Virtue and its emanation, terror 133

Yesterday a revolutionary terrorist armed with a gun and bombs advanced in an Antifa mob to attack a US institution of law-enforcement. Fortunately, police shot him dead before he effected mass murder.

Matt Vespa writes at Townhall:

So, when can we call Antifa a full-blown domestic terror organization? Over the weekend, police killed an activist from this progressive mob after he tried to assault an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Tacoma, Washington. Willem Van Spronsen, 69, was armed with a rifle and incendiary devices … This man is … part of a larger mob of progressive thugs who hate this country and any authority figures that seek to uphold law and order. …  A friend of Spronsen thought this was a suicide, believing this assault was meant to spark a larger conflict.

Spronson’s friends praise him as a hero and martyr. They believe themselves to be virtuous. Most virtuous.

So we have it on the authority of Seattle Antifascist Action (Antifa) that this would-be mass-murderer was “kind”, and “deeply loved” by “many communities”.

Who and what are these communities who deeply loved this kind man? Implied are persons of legendary oppression grouped together by their Antifa champions according to their class, race, or abnormal sexual preferences. For them – made virtuous by their oppression – the enforcers of the law must be killed and government overthrown.

Yesterday, July 14, was Bastille day, and as usual France celebrated it.

Roger Kimball wondered why.

He writes at American Greatness:

Since I am writing on Bastille Day, I am prompted to wonder why the French—or anyone else, for that matter—celebrate this infamous date. After all, the “storming” of that royal keep in 1789 was the spark that started the conflagration of the French Revolution. Unlike the American Revolution, in which the rule of law and the institutions of civil society survived the change of governments, the French Revolution was one of the signal bad events in world history. It consumed civil society and the centuries-old institutions of civilization. It was an unalloyed triumph of the totalitarian spirit, and in this respect it presaged and inspired that even greater assault on decency and freedom, the Bolshevik Revolution, the opening act of one of the darkest chapters in human history. The butcher’s bill for the French Revolution is many hundreds of thousands. Soviet Communism was responsible for the deaths of tens upon tens of millions and the universal immiseration of the people whose lives it controlled. …

One canard that we were all brought up on is that the Bastille was a loathsome dungeon full of innocent political prisoners. In fact, it harbored not hordes but precisely seven inmates when the mob stormed it. Contrary to what you have been told, the prisoners were detained in good conditions. At least one was attended by his own chef.  Bernard-René de Launay, the governor, was by all accounts a fair and patient man. But that did not save him from the mob’s “revolutionary justice”. They dragged him out of the fortress and stabbed him to death.

By rights, Bastille Day should be a day of national mourning or contrition. That it is not tells us a great deal—about the persistence of human credulousness, for example, and the folly of subordinating the imperfect, long-serving structures of civilization to the demands of impatient people infatuated by their own unquenchable sense of virtue. Tocqueville, in his book on the ancien régime at the eve of the revolution said that the “the contrast between benign theories and violent acts” was one of the Revolution’s “strangest characteristics”.

Strange it may have been, but it has turned out to be a regular feature of the totalitarian sensibility. What could be more benign sounding than slogans about “liberty, equality, fraternity”, O Citoyen, but how oppressive, how murderous, were their implementation “on the ground”? Robespierre cut to the chase when he spoke of “virtue and its emanation, terror”. He knew that the index of the sort of virtue he proselytized—a heady confection inherited from Rousseau—was the rapidity with which le rasoir national, the guillotine, pursued its grisly business. The pursuit of virtue by communists is a hundred, a thousand times bloodier and more soul blighting.

And here in America, “Kill, kill, kill,” say the Antifa assassins, thirsty for our blood.

Note: Antifa is the military wing of the Democratic Party, self-appointed maybe, but not rejected.

Posted under France, revolution, United States by Jillian Becker on Monday, July 15, 2019

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Islamic FBI 170

There is a joke told about the British Foreign Office. A mole, an infiltrator, was found in it. He was working for Britain!

The same could be said of the FBI. There are no doubt many moles working in it – for the United States of America.

But it would be no joke, because many of the rest of them are all too effectively working for the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizbollah, and (we guess) Iran, Syria, Qatar …

And if also for Russia, China, Cuba and North Korea, should we be surprised?

Only recently, top FBI officials have been exposed as having worked for Hillary Clinton and the DNC. Can one get more anti-American than that?

Here’s John Guandolo, former FBI agent (a “mole” for America) and president of Understanding The Threat, writing at Front Page:

When I arrived in Saudi Arabia in early 2002 on a trip with the FBI Director, which included approximately a dozen countries across the Middle East and beyond, I was shocked to learn that both the FBI’s Legal Attache and the Assistant Legal Attache to Saudi Arabia converted to Islam while in country.

It was no wonder they were less than helpful when we arrived to plan the Director’s visit.

Then there was the case of Gamal Abdel-Hafiz, a Muslim FBI Special Agent who refused to wear a wire while meeting with Muslims who were subjects of FBI investigations.

Worse yet was the case of Nada Prouty, who was an FBI Special Agent from a Hizbollah family who also worked for the CIA for a period of time. Prouty was fired from the FBI for “marriage fraud” but was never prosecuted for using FBI systems to ensure members of her family – Hizbollah – were not being investigated by the FBI, nor was an espionage investigation conducted.

And these are not even the worst of the cases.

In 2010, when investigative journalist and researcher Patrick Poole saw a photo of a recent “FBI Citizen’s Academy” class in front of the U.S. National Counter Terrorism Center, he saw a familiar face: Hamas leader Sheikh Kifah Mustapha.

Mustapha is an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history – US v. Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), Northern District of Texas, 2008 – where HLF and its leaders were proven to be a part of the designated Foreign Terrorist Organization Hamas.

Mustapha was a top official at HLF.

As a part of the FBI’s Citizens Academy, Mustapha was given a tour of FBI Headquarters, the FBI training academy in Quantico, Virginia, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), and other government spaces.

It was reported Mustapha asked “very detailed questions” about the inner-workings of these government organizations. Read: espionage.

The FBI initially lied to Patrick Poole and told Poole that Mustapha was not a part of the Citizen’s Academy. When confronted with the photographic evidence, the FBI admitted they actually took the photo and Mustapha was a prominent member of the Chicago Palestinian community.

A senior government official told Poole that Mustapha’s name and details of his Hamas affiliation are in FBI and NCTC data bases, and a DHS official told Poole off-the-record NCTC had to shut down its systems to let Sheikh Kifah Mustapha in the door.

“The FBI failed to intercede against Fort Hood terrorist Major Nidal Malik Hasan as a result of its politically correct strategy of reaching out to suspect Islamic groups and clerics instead of combating head-on the Muslim radicalization movement in the United States.”

How do things like this happen?

In February 2002, FBI Director Robert Mueller III met with “Muslim leaders” and instituted new “cultural sensitivity” programs at the FBI. What were the sources of his input?

U.S. Hamas leader Nihad Awad and other leaders of Hamas/CAIR, leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood’s American Muslim Council (AMC) founded by Al Qaeda financier Abdurahman Alamoudi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), and other similar suit-wearing jihadis were among those meeting with the FBI Director.

Over the years, the FBI has conducted public events, multi-day seminars at Washington, D.C. think tanks, and other such programs alongside easily-identifiable jihadis/terrorists.

Since the training programs I created in 2006 and 2007, the FBI to teach agents, analysts, police officers and prosecutors about the Islamic networks and their doctrine (sharia), no other programs have been conducted like them in the FBI. In fact, under FBI Director Mueller, all remaining factual information about Islam was scrubbed from FBI training programs.

In 2008, in the FBI’s centennial publication, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) has a half-page ad. This is the same ISNA the Department of Justice identified as a Muslim Brotherhood organization directly funding the terrorist group Hamas.

To make matters worse, the FBI takes out recruiting ads in ISNA’s monthly magazine Islamic Horizons.

ISNA’s former President Mohamad Magid is beloved by FBI leadership. In 2005, the Special Agent in Charge of the Washington Field Office Michael Rolince gave Magid an award for being an awesome citizen and helping the FBI. In 2016, FBI Director James Comey gave Magid the FBI Director’s Award.

This may explain why the three (3) muslim organizations listed on the FBI’s website as “Outreach Partners” are all Muslim Brotherhood organizations: Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), Muslim Advocates, and Mohamed Magid’s All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) located in Sterling, Virginia.

What is the result of the FBI having no fact-based training on Islam, sharia, and the modus operandi of the Islamic Movement while simultaneously working for 17 years with the very enemy the FBI claims it needs to prosecute?

Currently, meaning today – June 28, 2019 – the daughter of a Muslim Brotherhood leader in the Washington, D.C. area – Rizwan Jaka – is working as an intern at the FBI’s Washington Field Office in the Counterterrorism Division.

Understanding the Threat is currently producing a more detailed report on the FBI’s catastrophic failure to understand the threat, and the consistency with which the FBI directly supports America’s enemies in this war.

These incidents, as detailed herein, constitutes criminal negligence, aiding and abetting terrorism, and a gross dereliction of duty by anyone involved.

Because the FBI has proven itself incapable of fulfilling its counter-terrorism mission, and unwilling to do what is necessary to right itself, UTT [Understanding The Threat] recommends a mission-built organization of less than 100 men and women be created, with all the Title authorities required to defeat the Islamic and Marxist Counter-States operating inside the United States.

We are over 17 years down the road in a war we are losing. It is time for aggressive and focused strategy to win. UTT has such a strategy.

What have we allowed to happen to us? 166

Anjuli Pandavar is a British atheist who was raised a Muslim in South Africa.

She was recently shut out of (misnamed!) Free Thought Blogs because, they say:

We have  been receiving complaints [about Anjuli Pandavar] from readers and other bloggers for months — and recent posts [by her] praising Fox News and blaming black Americans for racism were the final straw. … We are skeptics and critics of dogma and authoritarianism, and in addition, we recognize that the nonexistence of deities entails a greater commitment to human values, and in particular, an appreciation of human diversity and equality.”

Pompous nonsense! And dogmatic. And wrong. There is absolutely nothing about atheism that requires one to “appreciate” Lefty dogma about “diversity” and “equity”.

They go on:

We are for feminism, against racism [except when it is against Whites], for diversity, against inequity.

It’s a general sentiment, but if you can’t meet any of it, you don’t belong here. We’ve been agonizing over rejecting Anjuli Pandavar all summer long, and the consensus of the active members of the FtB community was that her continued presence was a betrayal of our principles.

You’ve gotta feel sorry for them. They went through agonies before kicking out a black woman for calling anti-White racism what it is.

 

Anjuli Pandavar writes cogently and incisively at Jihad Watch:

Thursday was 4 July 2019, the 832nd anniversary of the Battle of Hattin, arguably the most symbolic, if not the most fateful, of Christian follies, when the stage was set for the Kingdom of Jerusalem to lose the very city that gave it its proud name, and for jihad to subdue Christian mediaeval backwardness under the yoke of Islamic pre-medieval backwardness. The Crusaders had taken the Cross and by virtue of that fact alone, most believed themselves invincible. Considerations of practicalities such as water, terrain or supply lines, or indeed, Salah ad-Din’s battle plans, were secondary at best, blasphemous at worst. The Crusaders had God, but they lost. It was inconceivable to them that Salah ad-Din, too, had God, and by virtue of that fact alone, the Muslims, too, believed themselves invincible. Relying on God in war is truly a gamble in which the odds are even.

Eight hundred and thirty-two years later, the unholy trinity of the Occident is secular: the god of political correctness; the god of multiculturalism; the god of diversity. Different gods purportedly wielded against the same jihad, except this time straining to subdue modern Judeo-Christian enlightenment under the same Islamic pre-mediaeval backwardness with which it confronted the Crusaders. On this year’s 4 July, we find ourselves in the midst of transition from the jihad of incessant victimhood, incessant taking of offence and incessant demands for special treatment, to the jihad of violent attacks and brutal enforcement of Shari’a by any Muslim, whether obviously “fighting in the way of Allah” or not. The voices that have been warning of this for so long now face more than just shrill denunciations for the blasphemies of “racism”, “fascism”, “intolerance” and “Islamophobia”, and for the heresy of being “far-right”. In chilling enactment of George Orwell’s 1984, they are being erased, and all levels of society are complicit in their erasure. Exactly how bad things have to get before such voices are taken seriously remains to be seen.

Gut-feel and all evidence of what jihad has managed to get away with in the West so far, strongly suggest that these voices of warning and truth will never be listened to. It seems that some of what were once Western societies will be defending Islam even as all manifestations of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and all other religions are destroyed, even as all democracy and all freedoms are obliterated, even as slavery is reinstated … , even as young white girls are shipped off en mass for sale in the Islamic heartlands, even as those who refuse dhimmitude and those who have left Islam are rounded up and publicly beheaded or crucified, even as married women see their husbands murdered before their eyes and are themselves dragged off to be raped, as per Muhammad’s excellent example, they will still be insisting that Islam is a religion of peace, is just like any other religion, and that Muslims are victims who have to be protected from “Islamophobia”.

And what of the God that the Enlightenment had relegated to a personal choice? I disagree with my Christian friends that we find ourselves in this worsening madness because “we have abandoned God”, and must return to him if we are to save ourselves from jihad. We owe our freedom, our equality and our democracy to our ousting God from his throne and lodging him instead in the hearts of those who will have him. God as free choice is the greatest achievement of the Enlightenment and one of the foundation stones of individual autonomy. Christian ideologues … seem not to realise that they argue directly against individual freedom when they seek to re-elevate God to a cosmic imperative. … Do not the perpetrators of jihad account for their own people’s troubles in exactly the same terms as Christian ideologues do? The ummah languishes in backwardness and misery in the face of infidel prowess, according to Qutb, Al-Banna, Maududi, Al-Qaradawi and others, precisely because Muslims have abandoned Islam and must return to it. Inter-religious squabbles over who has God and who hasn’t have always been the one-sided blindness on which religious exceptionalism, not to say arrogance, floundered. That way lies tragedy. … This is not the time for Christians to be stoking turf wars with atheists.

Just to be absolutely clear, I am an atheist … Not only that, I think religion erodes our innate sense of ethics, and that faith can diminish our humanity. But I also accept that belief is a central component of the way many people’s heads work. That, in and of itself, does not make them bad people. My head, though, does not work in that way. I could not function if there were something that I had to accept without question. The problem before us right now is Islam and I do not care if someone leaves Islam to become a Bible-basher or a Hari-Krishna chanter or an atheist. All I care about right now is that as many Muslims as possible leave Islam, that we support the victims of Islam, wherever they are in the world, and that we roll back jihad, by whatever means necessary. Muslims are already raping our daughters and we are already complicit in their deeds. The situation is dire.

We are helpless in face of the jihad onslaught because we have abandoned ourselves. We are no longer the human beings that the Enlightenment created.

We are not even the human beings who vowed to go on to the end, to fight in France, to fight on the seas and oceans, to fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, to defend our island, whatever the cost may be, to fight on the beaches, to fight on the landing grounds, to fight in the fields and in the streets, to fight in the hills; to never surrender. Where are those heroic people now? If they are still with us, it is perhaps the greatest tragedy that they will live to see that they have died for nothing.

We became complicit when we substituted political correctness and identity politics for our common human decency and respect for human life and human freedoms, as if what wasn’t broke needed fixing. We drank from the poisoned chalice of “groups” and “communities” having rights that supersede the rights of individuals and entitlements to protection over the protection of individuals. Britain’s Muslim rape gang crisis stems not solely from Islamic sanction of such behaviour and jihad insistence on it, but from those Muslims who would be inclined to rape finding themselves in the enabling environment created by multicultural Britain. It is both dishonest and dishonourable to refer to Muslim rape gangs as either “Asian” or “grooming gangs”. They are distinguished not by being “Asian” or even “Pakistani”. They are Muslim, and they rape because they are Muslim (anyone with a fully-functioning capacity for language will immediately recognise that this in no way implies anything about Muslims not involved in gang rape). … In 80s and 90s Britain, there was widespread fear of social workers who seized children from parents at the slightest sign of anything that could indicate child abuse. Now social workers aid and abet paedophilia. Then, the residents of entire council estates physically drove paedophiles from their houses. Now, they won’t touch them. Is that because the white paedophile rings of the 80s and 90s did not have a 1.6 billion-strong religion behind them? Is it because then, “racism” still meant “racism,” and those who knew they weren’t racist had no fear of those who would call them that?

It has been a small step from identity politics to so-called “oppressed and oppressor groups”, to “all whites are racist”, to the denial of Muslim women’s oppression, to infidels taking offence at critique of Islam, to our own schools indoctrinating our own children to favour an ideology intent on enslaving them, and of course, to denial of the Muslim rape gang crisis.

In London, the setting of 1984, on 4 July 2019, a trial opened in the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, otherwise known as “the Old Bailey”. It was no ordinary trail, but one in which the British state, by means foul and fouler, once more attempted to turn an innocent man into a criminal, after having failed several times before. A farce played out behind a noble injunction carved in stone over the heads of all who enter upon that august place: Defend the Children of the Poor and Punish the Wrongdoers. The man on trial was Tommy Robinson, and he was on trial for doing exactly that: defending the children of the poor and attempting to have the wrongdoers punished. Robinson, in his own naivete, still believes that the British state observes the rule of law, and fails to understand why mainstream journalists are happy to see the state abuse him. The wrongdoers, as it turned out, were not only the gangs of Muslim men who raped tens or hundreds of thousands of poor infidel girls up and down the land, but the many and varied arms of the state itself, who not only failed to punish the wrongdoers, but went out of their way to protect them and continue to protect them. The Ministry of Truth has shown that just because something is written in stone, doesn’t mean it’s true forever. Right before sending this essay off for publication, I learnt that Tommy Robinson had been “found guilty”. 

And now, in the ultimate ignominy, the pinnacle of our civilisational accomplishment, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is to be subjugated to the strictures of Shari’a, a barbaric seventh-century affront to humanity and decency, with the full support of many who would themselves be destroyed by such a folly. For folly it is to believe that self-righteous appeasement of Muslim powers can win over to coexistence and mutual respect adherents of an ideology that holds at its core the certainty of its own supremacy and a sacred, unshakeable hatred of all others, others whom it must, by divine order, kill, convert or subdue, and that employs the vilest and most deceitful of means to attain its end … This coup is taking place at the United Nations complex in New York, where, in the now non-existent shadow of the now non-existent twin towers, those who survived jihad’s greatest-ever single carnage to date and those who came after, do their best to celebrate The 4th of July. On this day, 243 years ago, they declared their land the protector of the freedom and equality of all human beings, and that from that day forth, no god shall meddle in their affairs.

Doing jihad’s dirty work for it has become an infidel virtue. … By the time the future Antifa Youth gets around to reporting on, denouncing and killing their own parents, there’ll be no one left to listen to the warning voices, for a Dark Age will once again be upon us. All the social, moral and ethical gains so hard-won over the centuries will be abolished overnight, reducing civilisation to that of brutal seventh-century Arabia, a foretaste of which is the Islamic State, Boko Haram, Al-Qaida, Al-Shabaab, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah and a spectacularly long list of others. It is most telling that, once brought into extensive contact with Western society and culture, especially at the height of colonialism, the Muslim middle classes, for whom the benefits were not only obvious but also accessible, adopted Western values and habits with some enthusiasm, there being no question in their minds about which was the superior culture. Many tried to do so without jettisoning Islam. Today they still recognise this, but must pretend not to, under pressure both from jihad, that insists that Islam is superior, and from the Western handmaidens of jihad, who insist that all cultures are good.

Posted under Commentary, Europe, Islam, jihad, Leftism, Muslims, Race, United Kingdom, United Nations, United States by Jillian Becker on Monday, July 8, 2019

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Turning Point USA and UK 179

This article was written by our associate in the UK, Chauncey Tinker. It was first published at The Participator, of which he is Founder and Editor-inChief. The original article displays the video footage we link to, and some other material that we are omitting. We suggest our readers visit The Participator to see it all, and to discover an excellent website in sympathy with our own opinion. Inevitably we have some differences of view, as America and Britain has each its own demographic conditions, the population of America having long been a mixture of ethnicities while the British were a homogeneous nation until quite recently. What we share are conservative principles. 

A conservative youth movement called Turning Point has emerged in the US, as I’m sure many readers are already aware. It isn’t a political party as such it is just a movement that argues for conservative politics and conservative values. The two individuals leading this movement in the US are Charlie Kirk the founder (who is white) and Candace Owens (who is black).

There is a short video clip of Candace in action in this tweet, where she is discussing the subject of reparations for the slave trade, which she rejects:

When people ask me about reparations, the first thing I do is laugh at the exhaustive stupidity and desperation of the Democrats.

… She [points out] that more than half of the world might have some claim for reparations if slavery in all bygone eras was taken into account, and she gives the examples of the Ottoman and Roman empires. Ms Owens has performed very well in media appearances in general in my opinion, there are a growing number of such clips from interviews. She also recently appeared at a congressional hearing where again she put those questioning her to shame.

On the subject of immigration the group generally seems to be pro legal immigration and anti illegal immigration. In this video (45 mins long approx) Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens join an audience for a debate in the UK (incidentally there is also a UK branch of Turning Point). Note that one of the UK speakers on the panel at this event condemned identity politics on the right and said that (at 28:40):

Tommy Robinson is someone who promotes identity politics on the right.

The UK representatives on the panel seemed to agree that Tommy Robinson should not be allowed to participate in the Turning Point movement, although none of them explained exactly what it was about Tommy’s activities that they objected to.

Charlie Kirk did speak out against the arrest of Tommy Robinson, and there was general agreement in the debate on the importance of freedom of speech. One member of the audience was critical of the UK branch of Turning Point for aligning too closely with the Conservative Party, which he rightly pointed out has an abysmal track record on freedom of speech.

The left wing media have predictably tried to smear the movement, we have seen ridiculous headlines in the UK including words such as “sinister” and “far-right”. At the above mentioned debate there are posters behind the panel listing the values the movement espouses:

    • Free Markets
    • Limited Government
    • Personal Responsibility
    • Do Unto Others

Surely these are only sinister values from the point of view of a rabid Marxist?

From the Independent:

Turning Point UK: Jacob Rees-Mogg and Tory MPs support new branch of ‘sinister’ right-wing US group

From the Guardian:

Tory MPs back youth group with apparent links to US far right

From the sub-title it becomes clear that one of the main concerns motivating this media opposition is the fact that some members have expressed “anti-Islam views”. Yes, that’s right, the problem is that some members shockingly oppose a violent, supremacist, patriarchal, misogynistic belief system called Islam.

The UK’s For Britain party has expressed support according to the above Guardian article (we’re supposed to be shocked by this information).

Another youth movement that emerged in recent years of course is Generation Identity, which seems to have faded from the spotlight somewhat lately, no doubt partly thanks to the state persecution the group has experienced in Austria. Members of the group were also refused entry to the UK last year.

A lot of people on the left seem to feel the same degree of antagonism towards both Turning Point and Generation Identity, even though Turning Point are an avowedly anti-racist organization, and say they oppose identity politics, whereas the Generation Identity group is very much focused on race. Of course you only have to oppose uncontrolled mass immigration these days, as both movements do, to be labelled as “far-right” etc. by the left. …

I strongly disagree with the Western policy of cherry picking only the best people from impoverished countries. This is for one thing helping to ensure those countries are perpetually failing, leading to an endless stream of “economic” migrants heading for the West. Some of the brightest and most articulate immigrants are also entering politics in the West, making it harder and harder for any party to advocate for serious border controls, as peer pressure mounts against anti-immigration views. The UK now even has a Muslim of Pakistani origin running the UK Home Office, the department in charge of immigration enforcement! I think the whole world needs to start thinking about the long term consequences of mass immigration and we need to face up to the turmoil that it is causing. We should be aiming for sustainability, not constantly destabilising both first and third world countries alike.

Generation Identity by contrast want to return Western countries to being racially predominately white European, and I fear this is also an objective that is fraught with problems. The demographic makeup of the West has already changed, not just with recent immigration but many people of many different ethnicities have already been here for several generations. There are also growing numbers of mixed race people in the West, although the percentage seems to be relatively small (around 1% in the UK apparently as far as I can determine from media reports).

I searched but could not find any mention of the huge issue of low Western birth rates in speeches by Turning Point members. For Generation Identity of course this is a major concern. …

I find myself somewhat caught in the middle between the two movements. I fear that a movement that focuses on race will likely create division not just between racial groups but also among conservatives. However, having observed growing anti-white racism in the UK … I feel we really need to call a complete halt to immigration. …

Unless we can put a stop to the trend towards anti-White racism I fear the West is going to become increasingly divided, and the risk of tensions spilling into violence grows with every passing day. Consequently I take the view that Western countries must build secure defences to keep migrants out, at least until other racial groups in the world also abandon their in-group preference (so far it seems only white Western nations have been inclined to do that).

Even leaving the questions of anti-white racism and in-group preference aside, the economic advantages of moving to the West are going to continue to act as a powerful magnet for continuing mass immigration until white Europeans become a minority everywhere in the West, and even eventually disappear altogether. Can you really claim that you are not racist yourself, that you like diversity, if you are happy to see white people disappear from the face of the earth?

While I think the emergence of the Turning Point movement is a positive development, and I hope they convert many young people to conservative ideals, I fear some of the most difficult subjects are being glossed over in the debates mentioned above. Above all we must talk about the disastrously low fertility rates in developed nations, failure to do so will I believe have catastrophic consequences not just for the West but for the whole world. 

Posted under Conservatism, United Kingdom, United States by Jillian Becker on Sunday, July 7, 2019

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Typhoid fever, the reward of the good 14

Visit the glamorous and super-ethical Sanctuary City of Los Angeles (under compassionate Democratic rule), in the Golden Sanctuary State of super-ethical California (under compassionate Democratic rule).

See there how the good Democrat-voting citizens of L.A. are being rewarded for their compassion for the homeless – with typhus, typhoid fever, and maybe soon bubonic plague.

Here’s a video about the disease-spreading rats of La La Land.

And here’s more information for visitors to the City of the Angels and Hollywood, reported six days ago (May 29, 2019) by the Los Angeles Times:

At least one Los Angeles Police Department employee at the agency’s downtown L.A. station has contracted the bacteria that causes typhoid fever and is being treated for the condition, the department confirmed Wednesday evening.

The LAPD said in a statement that it had “learned about an employee from our Central Division who has contracted Salmonella Typhi,” the bacteria that causes typhoid fever.

The department confirmed that a second employee has contracted a lower intestinal infection, but a specific diagnosis has not been determined.

A source who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly said that a third employee had also left work with similar symptoms, and that all three employees were detectives. …

Typhoid fever is a life-threatening illness … It is not commonly found in the United States but rather typically occurs in parts of the world where water is more likely to be contaminated with sewage …

Not all the residents of Los Angeles who pay property taxes for clean streets and sidewalks are happy with the filth, the rats, the danger of disease. They complain that they are not getting the services they pay for.

So what can be done – other than letting plague break out and sweep through the city?

Remedies:

Get the thousands of campers off the streets by giving them houses? Then do the same for the thousands more who will come and camp on the streets until they get their houses? And then again more, and more, without limit? Free houses for all without limit? Paid for how and by whom?

Or:

Arrest all who sleep on the street and keep them in jail until they get a job?

Plus put the mentally ill in hospitals for the mentally ill?

Vote in a Republican city council and state government?

Posted under Ethics, Health, United States, Videos by Jillian Becker on Monday, June 3, 2019

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Spying yes, treason no, gross bias yes 103

In this video there is rather too much chat by the CBS people about what Attorney General Barr said and why, and too little of Barr speaking for himself. But we post it for what Barr says between 3 minutes and 3.47 minutes about the importance of not destroying our institutions, and that it is not President Trump who is doing that but his accusers.

 

Here are some more extracts from the interview. You can read the whole of it here.

JAN CRAWFORD: You have testified that you believe spying occurred.

WILLIAM BARR: Yes.

JAN CRAWFORD: Into the Trump campaign.

WILLIAM BARR: Yes.

JAN CRAWFORD: You’ve gotten some criticism for using that word.

WILLIAM BARR: Yeah, I mean, I guess it’s become a dirty word somehow. It hasn’t ever been for me. I think there is nothing wrong with spying, the question is always whether it is authorized by law and properly predicated and if it is, then it’s an important tool the United States has to protect the country.

JAN CRAWFORD: On using the word, I mean, do you understand, and I know that some of the, some former intelligence chiefs have said that the president has made that word somewhat pejorative, that there is spying, this is a witch hunt, this is a hoax, and so your use of that word makes it seem that you are being a loyalist.

WILLIAM BARR: You know, it’s part of the craziness of the modern day that if a president uses a word, then all of a sudden it becomes off bounds. It’s a perfectly good English word, I will continue to use it.

JAN CRAWFORD: You’re saying that spying occurred. There’s not anything necessarily wrong with that.

WILLIAM BARR: Right.

JAN CRAWFORD: As long as there’s a reason for it.

WILLIAM BARR: Whether it’s adequately predicated. And look, I think if we – we are worried about foreign influence in the campaign? We should be because the heart of our system is the peaceful transfer of power through elections and what gives the government legitimacy is that process. And if foreign elements can come in and affect it, that’s bad for the republic. But by the same token, it’s just as, it’s just as dangerous to the continuation of self-government and our republican system that we not allow government power, law enforcement or intelligence power, to play a role in politics, to intrude into politics, and affect elections.

JAN CRAWFORD: So it’s just as dangerous – So when we talk about foreign interference versus say a government abuse of power, which is more troubling?

WILLIAM BARR: Well they’re both, they’re both troubling.

JAN CRAWFORD: Equally?

WILLIAM BARR: In my mind, they are, sure. I mean, republics have fallen because of Praetorian Guard mentality where government officials get very arrogant, they identify the national interest with their own political preferences and they feel that anyone who has a different opinion, you know, is somehow an enemy of the state. And you know, there is that tendency that they know better and that, you know, they’re there to protect as guardians of the people. That can easily translate into essentially supervening the will of the majority and getting your own way as a government official.

JAN CRAWFORD: And you are concerned that that may have happened in 2016?

WILLIAM BARR: Well, I just think it has to be carefully look at because the use of foreign intelligence capabilities and counterintelligence capabilities against an American political campaign to me is unprecedented and it’s a serious red line that’s been crossed.

JAN CRAWFORD: Did that happen?

WILLIAM BARR: There were counterintelligence activities undertaken against the Trump Campaign. And I’m not saying there was not a basis for it, that it was legitimate, but I want to see what that basis was and make sure it was legitimate. The attorney general’s responsibility is to make sure that these powers are not used to tread upon first amendment activity and that certainly was a big part of my formative years of dealing with those issues. The fact that today people just seem to brush aside the idea that it is okay to you know, to engage in these activities against a political campaign is stunning to me especially when the media doesn’t seem to think that it’s worth looking into. They’re supposed to be the watchdogs of, you know, our civil liberties.

JAN CRAWFORD: So –

WILLIAM BARR: That’s one of the, you know, one of the key responsibilities of the Attorney General, core responsibilities of the Attorney General is to make sure that government power is not abused and that the right of Americans are not transgressed by abusive government power. That’s the responsibility of the Attorney General.

JAN CRAWFORD: You know the – I guess – we’ve spent the last two years or more talking about and hearing about Russian interference into the elections and what occurred there. And so now we’re shifting to talking about actually investigating, reviewing that investigation and the people who did that. So I guess in making this turn can you help us understand, I mean what’s – what is the concern? What have you seen, what’s the basis for that?

WILLIAM BARR: Well I don’t want to  get you know, too much into the facts because it’s still under review. But I think it’s important to understand what basis there was for launching counterintelligence activities against a political campaign, which is the core of our second amendment – I’m sorry, the core of our first amendment liberties in this country. And what was the predicate for it? What was the hurdle that had to be crossed? What was the process – who had to approve it? And including the electronic surveillance, whatever electronic surveillance was done. And was everyone operating in their proper lane? And I’ve selected a terrific career prosecutor from the department who’s been there over thirty years, he’s now the U.S. attorney.

WILLIAM BARR: But he has, over the years, been used by both Republican and Democratic attorney generals to investigate these kinds of activities. And he’s always gotten the most laudatory feedback from his work. So there’s no doubt in my mind that he’s going – he’s going to conduct a thorough and fair review of this. And we’re working closely with the intelligence agencies, the bureau and the agency and others to help us reconstruct what happened. And I want to see, what were the standards that were applied. What was the evidence? What were the techniques used? Who approved them? Was there a legitimate basis for it?

JAN CRAWFORD: Okay. Yes. … Obviously you’ve seen this like the people are raising concerns that this is going to undermine FBI morale. The rank and file – what are we saying here – but you said in recent Senate testimony, “this is not launching an investigation of the FBI frankly to the extent there were any issues at the FBI, I do not view it as a problem that’s endemic to the FBI. I think there was probably a failure among a group of leaders there at the upper echelon.”

WILLIAM BARR: That’s right.

JAN CRAWFORD: So there was probably a failure among a group of leaders there at the upper echelon?

WILLIAM BARR: Correct. In other words, I don’t believe this is a problem you know, rife through the bureau.

JAN CRAWFORD: What suggests to you there was a failure in the upper echelon at the FBI?

WILLIAM BARR: Because I think the activities were undertaken by a small group at the top which is one of the – probably one of the mistakes that has been made instead of running this as a normal bureau investigation or counterintelligence investigation. It was done by the executives at the senior level. Out of head quarters –

JAN CRAWFORD: And you’re talking about James Comey, McCabe?

WILLIAM BARR: I’m just not going to get into the individual names at this point. But I just view that – I don’t view it as a bureau wide issue. And I will say the same thing for other intelligence agencies. And they’re being very cooperative in helping us.

JAN CRAWFORD: They’re being cooperative?

WILLIAM BARR: Yes.

JAN CRAWFORD: You’re working with the DNI, the head of CIA. I want to ask you about something – just declassification. But the president has tweeted and said publicly that some in the upper echelon, Comey, McCabe, etc., committed treason. I mean do you agree with that?

WILLIAM BARR: Well, I – as a lawyer I always interpret the word treason not colloquially but legally. And you know the very specific criteria for treason – so I don’t think it’s actually implicated in the situation that we have now. But I think what he —

JAN CRAWFORD: Legally.

WILLIAM BARR: Right.

JAN CRAWFORD: You don’t think that they’ve committed treason?

WILLIAM BARR: Not as a legal matter, no.

JAN CRAWFORD: But you have concerns about how they conducted the investigation?

WILLIAM BARR: Yes, but you know, when you’re dealing with official government contact, intent is frequently a murky issue. I’m not suggesting that people did what they did necessarily because of conscious, nefarious motives. Sometimes people can convince themselves that what they’re doing is in the higher interest, the better good. They don’t realize that what they’re doing is really antithetical to the democratic system that we have. They start viewing themselves as the guardians of the people that are more informed and insensitive than everybody else. They can – in their own mind, they can have those kinds of motives. And sometimes they can look at evidence and facts through a biased prism that they themselves don’t realize. That something objectively as applied as a neutral principle across the board really you know, shouldn’t be the standard used in the case but because they have a particular bias they don’t see that. So that’s why procedures and standards are important and review afterward is an important way of making sure that government power is being conscientiously and properly applied. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there are people – you know, that people have crossed lines have done so with corrupt intent or anything like that.

JAN CRAWFORD: But it seems like you have a concern that there may have been a bias by top officials in the FBI as they looked at whether to launch and conduct this investigation?

WILLIAM BARR: Well it’s hard to read some of the texts with and not feel that there was gross bias at work and they’re appalling. And if the shoe were on the other–

JAN CRAWFORD: Appalling.

WILLIAM BARR: Those were appalling. And on their face they were very damning and I think if the shoe was on the other foot we could be hearing a lot about it. If those kinds of discussions were held you know when Obama first ran for office, people talking about Obama in those tones and suggesting that “Oh that he might be a Manchurian candidate for Islam or something like that”. You know some wild accusations like that and you had that kind of discussion back and forth, you don’t think we would be hearing a lot more about it?

JAN CRAWFORD: You – I guess when you said that there were things done that were not the typical run of business, ad hoc, small group, it’s not how these counterintelligence operations normally work. I  think that maybe Comey and others might say well this was such an extraordinary thing we had to keep it so closely held. So we had to do it differently what’s your response to that? Is that legit?

WILLIAM BARR: Well it might be legit under certain circumstances but a lot of that has to do with how good the evidence was at that point. And you know Mueller has spent two and half years and the fact is there is no evidence of a conspiracy. So it was bogus, this whole idea that the Trump was in cahoots with the Russians is bogus. …

JAN CRAWFORD: I know you’ve seen some of the criticism and the push back on this. Do you have any concerns that doing this investigation, talking about de-classifying certain materials – that that’s undermining your credibility or the credibility of the department?

WILLIAM BARR: No I – I don’t. I think it’s – actually the reaction is somewhat strange. I mean normally–

JAN CRAWFORD: Strange?

WILLIAM BARR: Sure.

JAN CRAWFORD: Their reaction?

WILLIAM BARR: Well the media reaction is strange. Normally the media would be interested in letting the sunshine in and finding out what the truth is. And usually the media doesn’t care that much about protecting intelligence sources and methods. But I do and I will. …

Posted under corruption, Crime, United States, Videos by Jillian Becker on Saturday, June 1, 2019

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Is religion a force for good? 43

One of our highly valued contributing readers, Jeanne, writes in a comment:

We may not like the form of “stabilization” that comes from Islam, but it worked to set up the type of community and family life that Mohammed desired. We may not like the “stabilizing” influence of Christianity from a thousand years ago, but it did the same. We may not like the Christianity of today that came from the Reformation, but it was a stabilizing factor of the beginning of our nation and forms the backbone of many communities by supporting the family, the individual and charities, which benefit them each. Judeo-Christian beliefs and values aided by the Enlightenment (or vice-versa) set the tone for the moral populace that was so important to our Constitutional Republic when it was making its mark and requiring such principled and responsible individuals to form a United States loosely held together by the laws of men and not divine-rule royalty or theocratic forces of Rome.

If we did not have such an organized Communist movement that worked on our nation for a century, helping to secularize the populace, we might have found that those who left the Judeo-Christian religion behind were still moral/ethical and responsible individuals disciplined enough to make a Constitutionalist proud, but that is not how it worked out. Instead we have no consequences for unethical behavior, because there is a deplorable lack of guidance for proper parental behavior, no reason to be ashamed of bearing out-of-wedlock children, no stigma to a man abandoning all his fatherly duties, no desire to be responsible, no desire to have allegiance to one’s community or country or to obey the nation’s laws and respect its heritage. And that has not so much come about as people left their church, but because of Progressive influence that has been very well done. Most people need religion to maintain a discipline of responsibility and morality.

We think it is a comment that deserves attention.

This is our review of it:

On Islam and the family: Muslim men can marry as many wives as they can afford to keep. The wives are totally subjected to the will of the husband. He is commanded by the Koran to beat her if he judges her to be disobedient or insubordinate in any way. There is no such thing as rape within marriage – a husband can rape his wife. A husband can divorce a wife by saying three times that he divorces her. For her, divorce is difficult to the point of being almost impossible. She cannot have custody of children past their infancy. A daughter can inherit only half as much as a son. If a woman is raped and four male witnesses did not witness actual penetration, she is not only considered uninjured, she is accused of illicit sexual intercourse which is a capital offense. Execution is by stoning. There is no lower limit to the age at which girls can be married. Little girls can be married to elderly men. Girls as young as five can be and often are raped by their lawful husbands literally to death. That was indeed the type of family life that Muhammad was said to desire. But if that is “stabilization”, then stability is no virtue.

On “Judeo-Christian”: This is a favorite hyphenation in the West of late. But it makes no more sense than would “Christio-Muslim”. (Islam derived some ideas from Christianity but it is a very different creed.) Christianity was a revolution against Judaism. The essential moral point of Jewish religious teaching was the idea of justice. (What those ancient men thought was just doesn’t match in every particular with what we may think is just, and the Jewish God is more a god of revenge than of justice, but the thrust of the doctrine was that guilt must be punished and innocence protected.) Christianity substituted love for justice. The guilty must be forgiven. The sin can be condemned but not the sinner. St. Paul, who is the author of the Christian religion (see the essay listed in our margin under Pages, The Birth and Early History of Christianity) wanted to abandon the Jewish Law altogether, insisting that it had been superseded by the “sacrifice” of “the Christ”. But the Church fathers could not organize an antinomian church so retrieved the entire Jewish bible as a prologue to their own “Testament” for the sake of preserving the moral law – which is to say, the “ten commandments”. They also needed the Jewish Bible for the prophesies of the Messiah, since they held Jesus to be the fulfillment of them. They changed the meaning of “Messiah” from ”King” to “God”, and declared that God was not One – the central tenet of Jewish theology – but Three. So little more than  a few laws, common to all the law codes of the Middle East and probably everywhere, remained of Judaism in Christianity. Christianity with its extreme intolerance even of slight doctrinal differences came down as a long night on Western Europe for a thousand years. Terrible religious wars between Christian factions, and between Christians and Gnostics such as the Cathars, took untold numbers of lives, century after century. What happened to families and the stability of communities while the Papal Inquisition was at work? Or in the civil wars fought over doctrinal differences? Or to the families and communities of the Jews persecuted throughout Christendom? It’s a blood-soaked history. When the Reformation came, the Protestant churches were as intolerant as the Roman Catholic church. The darkness was lifted at last only by the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment was a revolution against all the orthodoxies of all the churches, and broke their power. Western greatness dates from the Enlightenment. Doubt, valued by pre-Christian Greece and Rome, came back from long suppression to challenge the churches’ insistence on unquestioning conformity. The two greatest products of the Enlightenment were Science and the Constitution of the United States of America.

In a nation that made no laws respecting religion, the history of Western religion changed. Old historical religious conflicts were put to rest. In America, millions live peacefully with neighbors of different faiths and none. (But new ideologies have arisen, secular religions, stirring up antagonisms as intense and bitter as did the old.)

It may well be the case now that American church-going families are in general happier and more successful than others. It may well be that the abandonment of traditional religion contributed of late to delinquency, fatherlessness, and disregard of familial, patriotic, and civic responsibility.

But does that mean most people need religion to live responsibly and morally?

Did most people behave more morally and responsibly when they feared divine retribution? Was there in fact less theft, rape, and murder when, through the long Christian centuries,  everybody went to church? And if so, was it a good bargain to have more security for one’s possessions and one’s person at the price of living one’s entire life in terror of eternal hellfire?

In the past, in the long perspective, has religion proved itself to be a force for good?

Is it good now for a civilized educated nation to teach children to believe that a person rules over the universe, continually watching their every thought and deed so as to reward or punish them?

Is it good if the citizens of a free republic believe that a Lord, a King, an invisible Sovereign rules over them?

Is it good to kneel to, worship, suffer for, pray to, an omnipotent, omniscient, unknowable, immortal Tyrant?

Posted under Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Religion general, United States by Jillian Becker on Friday, May 24, 2019

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Freedom of speech on the internet 77

In 2011 Elizabeth Warren said:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did.

In 2012 President Obama said:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me – because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t – look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something – there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

Whether or not they meant to be attacking private enterprise capitalism, that is what they were generally understood to be doing.

The capitalist, free-market argument is that if you own something you can use it as you like for all lawful purposes. If bakers of wedding cakes do not want to sell a cake, or florists do not want to supply bouquets, to same-sex couples, they are within their rights not to do so.

It is generally agreed that the private owners of places of public entertainment such as restaurants, movie theaters, hotels cannot be permitted to shut out some customers on grounds of personal antagonism.

Controversy has arisen as to whether the private owners of the “social media”, notably Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google, have a right to refuse the use of their forums to persons whose opinions they dislike, or whether they have the same obligations as owners of restaurants, movie theaters and hotels not to discriminate against some on grounds of personal disagreement.

Daniel Greenfield writes this magisterial opinion on the arguments:

“But, it’s a private company.”

It’s a familiar argument. Bring up the problem of Google, Facebook and Twitter suppressing conservative speech and many conservatives will retort that it’s a free market. The big dot com monopolies created their own companies, didn’t they? And we wouldn’t want government regulation of business.

In a FOX Business editorial, Iain Murray writes that breaking up dot coms like Google would be “a repudiation of conservative principles”. He argues that “Twitter is a private company” and that “there is no positive right to free speech on Twitter or any other private venue.”

“The same goes for the president’s attacks on Google and the complaints of conservative censorship,” Diane Katz writes at the Heritage Institute. “These private enterprises are not obligated to abide any sort of partisan fairness doctrine.”

The talking point that Google, Facebook and Twitter are private companies that can discriminate as they please on their private platforms, and that the First Amendment doesn’t apply, is in the air everywhere.

But it overlooks two very simple facts.

The driving force behind the censorship of conservatives isn’t a handful of tech tycoons. It’s elected officials. Senator Kamala Harris offered an example of that in a recent speech where she declared that she would “hold social media platforms accountable” if they contained “hate” or “misinformation”.

“Misinformation” is a well-known euphemism among Democrats and the media for conservative political content. It was originally known as “fake news” before President Trump hijacked the term to refer to the media. The recent Poynter list of “unreliable” sites was stacked with conservative sites. Lists like these aren’t hypothetical. Poynter runs the International Fact Checking Network which had been empowered by Facebook and other sites to deplatform conservative content through its “fact checks”.

All of this got underway in response to claims by Hillary Clinton and her allies that “fake news” had cost her the election and represented a grave attack on our democracy. The call was quickly taken up by Democrats in the House and the Senate. It’s been commented on supportively by powerful Clinton allies in the tech industry, like Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google.

Dot coms like Facebook are cracking down on conservatives as an explicit response to pressure from elected government officials. That’s not the voluntary behavior of private companies. When Facebook deletes conservatives in response to threats of regulatory action from Senate Democrats, its censors are acting as government agents while engaging in viewpoint discrimination.

Free market conservatives can argue that Facebook should have the right to discriminate against conservatives. But do they really want to argue that Senate Democrats should have the right to compel private companies to censor conservatives?

What’s the difference between that and a totalitarian state?

It might, arguably, be legal for your landlord to kick you out of your house because he doesn’t like the fact that you’re a Republican. But is it legal for him to do so on orders from Senator Kamala Harris?

Defending abusive behavior like that is a desecration of the free market.

The second fact is that the internet is not the work of a handful of aspiring entrepreneurs who built it out of thin air using nothing but their talent, brains and nimble fingers.

At this point we are going to have to concede, however much it stings our political nerve to do so, that Obama got something right when he said that Government research created the internet.

The internet was the work of DARPA. That stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is part of the Department of Defense. DARPA had funded the creation of the core technologies that made the internet possible. The origins of the internet go back to DARPA’s Arpanet.

Nor did the story end once the internet had entered every home.

Where did Google come from? “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” the original paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the co-founders of Google, reveals support from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and even NASA.

Harvard’s computer science department, where Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg learned to play with the toys that turned him into a billionaire, has also wallowed in DARPA cash. Not to mention funds from a variety of other DOD and Federal science agencies.

Taxpayers sank a fortune into developing a public marketplace where ideas are exchanged, and political advocacy and economic activity takes place. That marketplace doesn’t belong to Google, Amazon or Facebook. And when those monopolies take a stranglehold on the marketplace, squeezing out conservatives from being able to participate, they’re undermining our rights and freedoms.

“A right of free correspondence between citizen and citizen on their joint interests, whether public or private and under whatsoever laws these interests arise (to wit: of the State, of Congress, of France, Spain, or Turkey), is a natural right,” Thomas Jefferson argued.

There should be a high barrier for any company seeking to interfere with the marketplace of ideas in which the right of free correspondence is practiced.

Critics of regulating dot com monopolies have made valid points.

Regulating Google or Facebook as a public utility is dangerous. And their argument that giving government the power to control content on these platforms would backfire is sensible.

Any solution to the problem should not be based on expanding government control.

But there are two answers.

First, companies that engage in viewpoint discrimination in response to government pressure are acting as government agents. When a pattern of viewpoint discrimination manifests itself on the platform controlled by a monopoly, a civil rights investigation should examine what role government officials played in instigating the suppression of a particular point of view.

Liberals have abandoned the Public Forum Doctrine, once a popular ACLU theme, while embracing censorship. But if the Doctrine could apply to a shopping mall, it certainly applies to the internet.

When dot com monopolies get so big that being banned from their platforms effectively neutralizes political activity, press activity and political speech, then they’re public forums.

Second, rights are threatened by any sufficiently large organization or entity, not just government. Government has traditionally been the most powerful such organization, but the natural rights that our country was founded on are equally immune to every organization. Governments, as the Declaration of Independence asserts, exist as part of a social contract to secure these rights for its citizens.

Government secures these rights, first and foremost, against itself. (Our system effectively exists to answer the question of who watches the watchers.) But it also secures them against foreign powers, a crisis that the Declaration of Independence was written to meet, and against domestic organizations, criminal or political, whether it’s the Communist Party or ISIS, that seek to rob Americans of their rights.

A country in which freedom of speech effectively did not exist, even though it remained a technical right, would not be America. A government that allowed such a thing would have no right to exist.

Only a government whose citizens enjoy the rights of free men legally justifies its existence.

If a private company took control of all the roads and closed them to conservatives every Election Day, elections would become a mockery and the resulting government would be an illegitimate tyranny.

That’s the crisis that conservatives face with the internet.

Protecting freedom of speech does not abandon conservative principles, it secures them. There are no conservative principles without freedom of speech. A free market nation without freedom of speech isn’t a conservative country. It’s an oligarchy. That’s the state of affairs on the internet.

Conservatives should beware of blindly enlisting in leftist efforts to take regulatory control of companies like Facebook. The result would be a deeper and more pervasive form of censorship than exists today. But neither should they imagine that the “free market side of history” will automatically fix the problem.

We have an existing useful toolset to draw on, from anti-trust laws to civil rights investigations to the Public Forum Doctrine. This will be a challenging process, but we must remember through it all, that we have a right to freedom of speech on the internet.

Our tax dollars, invested over generations, built this system. It does not belong to the Left. Or, for that matter, the Right. It belongs to all of us.

Now how to make sure Facebook etc. do not discriminate against us because of their political bias?

President Trump is willing to help us. (Though exactly what he can do we don’t know.)

SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Yet too many Americans have seen their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear “violations” of user policies. 

No matter your views, if you suspect political bias caused such an action to be taken against you, share your story with President Trump.

https://whitehouse.typeform.com/to/Jti9QH?fbclid=IwAR1oumZ36_InMnU29hRFZukzdSUrbBAxAaQ338B2_Lf-DYxMTJr2UBJMJWs

It’s worth trying.

.

(Hat-tip to liz for the White House link)

 

 

A dummy’s guide to the abuse, exploitation, and abolition of children 187

The Democratic Party is promoting abortion as the defining right of women. The enfranchised woman must have a right not to be forced into a woman’s “gender role” – which is to say, not to be a mother

The Left considers it a health right to have free contraception provided under insurance policies. Though male and female must be equal in sexual behavior, women can change their minds after intercourse and ruin the reputation of men through meetooism, an auxiliary right to special women’s justice which does away with due process

Democrats will probably not go as far as the mandatory, forced abortions of China. The one child policy there resulted in mass female infanticide. It is more important to abort boys in the “patriarchal” West. There is no need to feel compassion for the babies. Compassion should be kept for black murderers of white cops. 

Tucker Carlson said on his Fox News show (Monday May 14, 2019): “We have a political party that believes having children is a punishment.” It’s true. When Barack Obama was president, he said he didn’t want his daughters to be “punished with a baby”. Many “progressive” intellectuals, including spokesmen for the medical profession, argue for abortion at any stage of a pregnancy and even advocate infanticide. A movie actress asks women to adopt absolute chastity as a form of protest because some states are not allowing abortion at any stage of pregnancy on demand.

A  female Democrat in the House of Representatives, said: “There is a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question. Is it OK to still have children?” That same Democrat, referring to the same “scientific census” (which does not exist) believes that the world is coming to an end in 12 years from now. It would be so unfair to give birth to a child who will have less that a dozen years to live.

Such a laudably unselfish view, that. But not common on the Left. The view that abortion is the defining right of women is the politically correct orthodox Democratic position. Children are invaders who would enter the world through the womb, occupying a woman’s body without her permission. Even though she knows how the invader gets in there, and almost always opens the door herself, she is being exploited. The invader must be evicted.

Those children who are so impudent and far-right, so bigoted, xenophobic, undiverse, uninclusive and Trumpian as to get born despite all efforts to abort them – or if their mother in collusion with a Democratic doctor does not kill them when they actually arrive in the world – then they must be made unhappy.

If they are white, they must be made to feel bad about it. Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi – an exemplary anti-human – has said that she is proud of her grandson for saying that he wished he was brown like his friend.

If they are male, it is worse.  If they are male and white they are the guiltiest of the guilty and must be accused, abased, cut up, punished.

Boys should be changed into girls. Or at least a parody of girls. And why should not all girls be changed into boys? Or at least a parody of boys. Start the process when they’re 4 years old. (A British judge just overruled a school’s objection to a 4 year old being treated as a transgender.) They hold that “gender” is only a “social construct”.

So feed them on hormones. Mangle their sexual organs. Make them sterile. Make them wretched.

And since the curse of children is upon the nation, make use of them. Have them vote – for the Democrats. The party that knows it can rely on the votes of felons, illegal aliens, and lunatics, believes just as reasonably that it will get the votes of children.

There are many other uses for children too. The Left recommends that they be taught how to make their parents worried about “climate change”. (And to report the parents to the Totalitarian Authorities if they are obstinate?)

On the Mexican border, migrant men rent children and pretend to be part of families that are not theirs in order to enter the US.

Hamas, the terrorist organization passionately supported by two Congresswomen, uses children as living shields against Israel’s retaliatory bombs and guns. The Palestinians train children to be suicide bombers.

Of course (we hope) the Left will not go as far as Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, who made children kill and eat their own parents and then be footsoldiers and sex slaves.

Children can even take the initiative in leading campaigns that advance the agenda of the Left. A Swedish teenager named Greta Thunberg, 16, is leading a children’s crusade against the mythical curse of “man-made global warming”. She has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

So we can be optimistic and surmise that the Democrats will probably not make it illegal to have children.

“Hurry up and lie …” 662

… to obstruct the will of the people.

That was a message sent by a lying British spy to the US State Department, the FBI, and Obama’s Department of Justice.

The State Department is notoriously the region of the US government swamp most thickly populated by its dirtiest denizens. They work devotedly and tirelessly in their dark reptilian ways to turn America into a Third World country. Lately they have been obediently assisted by members of their species that have slithered their way into the FBI.

No subversive activity however slimy, secretive and socialist found to be going on in either agency should be surprising. But it can still be shocking.

John Solomon, the excellent investigative journalist who has discovered and revealed so much about the Great Steele Dossier Hoax To Destroy Donald Trump, writes at The Hill:

If ever there were an admission that taints the FBI’s secret warrant to surveil Donald Trump’s campaign, it sat buried for more than 2 1/2 years in the files of a high-ranking State Department official.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec’s written account of her Oct. 11, 2016, meeting with FBI informant Christopher Steele shows the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded British intelligence operative admitted that his research was political and facing an Election Day deadline.

And that confession occurred 10 days before the FBI used Steele’s now-discredited dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s ties to Russia.

Steele’s client “is keen to see this information come to light prior to November 8”, the date of the 2016 election, Kavalec wrote in a typed summary of her meeting with Steele and Tatyana Duran, a colleague from Steele’s Orbis Security firm. The memos were unearthed a few days ago through open-records litigation by the conservative group Citizens United.

Kavalec’s notes do not appear to have been provided to the House Intelligence Committee during its Russia probe, according to former Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). “They tried to hide a lot of documents from us during our investigation, and it usually turns out there’s a reason for it,” Nunes told me. Senate and House Judiciary investigators told me they did not know about them, even though they investigated Steele’s behavior in 2017-18.

One member of Congress transmitted the memos this week to the Department of Justice’s inspector general, fearing its investigation of FISA abuses may not have had access to them.

Nonetheless, the FBI is doing its best to keep much of Kavalec’s information secret by retroactively claiming it is classified, even though it was originally marked unclassified in 2016. 

The apparent effort to hide Kavalec’s notes from her contact with Steele has persisted for some time.

State officials acknowledged a year ago they received a copy of the Steele dossier in July 2016, and got a more detailed briefing in October 2016 and referred the information to the FBI.

But what was discussed was not revealed. Sources told me more than a year ago that Kavalec had the most important (and memorialized) interaction with Steele before the FISA warrant was issued, but FBI and State officials refused to discuss it, or even confirm it.

The encounter, and Kavalec’s memos, were forced into public view through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation by Citizens United. Yet, all but a few lines have been redacted after the fact.

The mere three sentences that the FBI allowed State to release unredacted, show that Kavalec sent an email two days after her encounter with Steele, alerting others.

“You may already have this information but wanted to pass it on just in case,” Kavalec wrote in the lone sentence the FBI and State released from that email. The names of the recipients, the subject line and the attachments are blacked out. …

The three sentences visible in her memo show that U.S. officials had good reason to suspect Steele’s client and motive in alleging Trump-Russia collusion because they were election-related and facilitated by the Clinton-funded Fusion GPS founder, Glenn Simpson.

A certain institution – identified for good reason by John Solomon as the Democratic National Committee (DNC) – approached Steele’s organization Orbis …

‘… based on the recommendation of Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch [of Fusion GPS]  …  and is keen to see this information come to light prior to November 8,” Kavalec wrote. “Orbis undertook the investigation in June of 2016.” …

The FBI under Director Christopher Wray classified the document as “secret” just a few days ago. To add injury to insult, the FBI added this hopeful note: “Declassify on 12/31/2041.” That would be 25 years after the 2016 election.

Despite the heavy redactions, Kavalec’s notes have momentous consequence.

For the first time, we have written proof the U.S. government knew well before the FBI secured the FISA warrant that Steele had a political motive and Election Day deadline to make his dossier public.

And we know that information was transmitted before the Carter Page FISA warrant to one or more people whose job is so sensitive that their identity had to be protected. That means there is little chance the FBI didn’t know about Steele’s political client, or the Election Day deadline, before requesting the FISA warrant.

Documents and testimony from Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, whose wife Nellie worked for Fusion GPS, show he told the FBI in August 2016 that Steele was “desperate” to defeat Trump and his work had something to do with Clinton’s campaign.

Kavalec’s notes make clear … the election was Steele’s deadline to smear Trump.

There is little chance the FBI didn’t know that Steele, then a bureau informant, had broken protocol and gone to the State Department in an effort to make the Trump dirt public.

That makes the FBI’s failure to disclose to the FISA judges the information about Steele’s political bias and motive all the more stunning. And it makes the agents’ use of his unverified dossier to support the warrant all the more shameful.

Kavalec’s notes shed light on another mystery from the text messages between the FBI’s Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, which first revealed the politically-biased nature of the Trump collusion probe.

Strzok, the lead FBI agent on the case, and Page, a lawyer working for the FBI deputy director, repeatedly messaged each other in October 2016 about efforts to pressure and speed the review of the FISA warrant.

For instance, on Oct. 11, 2016, Strzok texted Page that he was “fighting with Stu for this FISA,” an apparent reference to then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stu Evans in DOJ’s national security division.

A few days later, on Oct. 14, Strzok emailed Page he needed some “hurry the F up pressure” to get the FISA approved.

If the evidence is good and the FISA request solid, why did the FBI need to apply pressure?

The real reason may be the FBI was trying to keep a lid on the political origins, motives and Election Day deadline of its star informant Steele.

And that would be the ultimate abuse of the FBI’s FISA powers.

We know what impatience feels like all too well as we wait for the Great Steele Dossier Hoaxsters to be brought to justice.

Now there’s a real need to hurry up and find the whole truth.

We fear that if it does not happen soon it will not happen at all.

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