If Americans really were oppressed, there would be no insurrection. The mobs are not destroying the cities because they are afraid, but because they are not afraid. 

David Horowitz writes at Front Page:

Perhaps the most emblematic moment in the battles raging in American cities came the other day when Bernie Sanders attacked President Trump’s decision to send federal agents to quell the riots in Portland Oregon. His alleged reason: they bear the earmarks of a “police state”. This, from a man who spent the entire sixty years of his adult life supporting every ruthless communist police state on the planet – and there were many – and who to this day declares his solidarity with the police states in the West Bank and Gaza run by his terrorist comrades in the PLO and Hamas. Of course these twisted values have made him the most popular Democrat leader.

Our cities are under siege by communists like Bernie and other self-declared enemies  of America who have made eminently clear that they are Marxists and their goal is the destruction of our democracy, which they hope to replace with a communist gulag.

In the last two months these violent criminals have torched 400 American cities, injured more than a thousand police officers, killed more than a dozen individuals, looted and destroyed billions of dollars worth of downtown real estate and merchandise, all the while demanding the defunding of police departments. This has led to a violent crime wave resulting in the deaths of scores of individuals including at least eight children – all of them black.

Most of them are white, some Jewish, and they hate Whites and they hate Jews. And they do it all in the name of a white Jew.

They see no contradiction there because they know nothing and cannot think.

(Of course this is not the first time that an anti-Jewish movement has swept up millions and proceeded to hound Jews in the name of a Jew! One such movement has been doing it for 2,000 years.)

Portland is the epicenter of this insurrection, the extent of which America hasn’t witnessed since the Civil War.

Every night for the last two months thousands of criminals have attacked Portland’s downtown, firing explosives and wielding machetes, terrorizing its inhabitants, setting fire to its hall of justice, smashing public monuments and calling for the abolition of the United States. Like every other major American city that has been victimized, Portland’s mayhem has been made possible by the actions of a seditious mayor and city council who have refused to perform the first task of government, which is to keep its citizens and their property safe.

These acts of treason have had the full support of the Democrat Party not only in the cities themselves but in Washington. When the President finally sent federal agents to do what local police had been ordered not to do, Nancy Pelosi described these public servants as “storm troopers” – Nazis. To support her seditious slander of men and women risking their lives to defend the public, she concocted a series of vicious lies to the effect that they had no identification on their uniforms or their vehicles and were therefore a “secret police”.

Obviously, if the vehicles were marked “Police”, they would be instantly set upon by the mob and destroyed.

Not a single Democrat in Washington criticized Pelosi for these vicious slanders, or condemned the insurrectionists. Instead they seconded her slanders. The Democrat Party is now a party that embraces criminals, sanctions the trashing of America’s great cities and the destruction of billions of dollars of public and private property. Its only enemies, apparently, are the president and the country itself. …

Portland is the issue that will re-elect Donald Trump in November.

Or America the free is finished.

The residents of the Powderhorn neighborhood of Minneapolis pledged never to call the police because they were convinced that the police are the enemies of black people people of color, treat them cruelly, and kill them with or without the least excuse. That – yes – even black police officers do this. So until police forces can all be abolished in America, the least a good white person can do – if “good white person” isn’t an oxymoron – is boycott the police.

Some of them came to regret their decision, especially when Powderhorn Park was occupied by vagrants homeless people, and the neighborhood, including the park itself, became a high crime area. (See our post Reality incorruptible, July 14, 2020)

Daniel Greenfield takes the story further at Front Page:

“If you are a comfortable white person asking to dismantle the police I invite you to reflect: are you willing to stick with it?” Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender had demanded [in early June]. “Will you be calling in three months to ask about garage break-ins? Are you willing to dismantle white supremacy in all systems, including a new system?”

Powderhorn residents had taken that message to heart and refused to call the police.

A few days later, a “juvenile” girl was assaulted. The Associated Press reported that “the people who took the victim to the hospital did not call police”.

By July, the encampment had grown to 800 people …

There have been assaults, rapes, theft, drug-dealing, overdoses, fights, bloodshed –

The oppressive system of “white supremacy” was being dismantled one rape at a time.

But –

Minneapolis officials have been steadily denying that dumping hundreds of vagrants in the park could possibly lead to crime.

“When we talk about crimes that happen here, these are not new crimes,” Minneapolis Park Board Commissioner AK Hassan insisted. As a Somali immigrant, he claimed that he won’t vote to evict anyone. “Let’s not find excuses.”

Hassan, a Rep. Ilhan Omar ally, had praised the vote to defund the police as an “opportunity to reimagine how we approach public safety, not only for our city but the entire country.”

How is the reimagining going? In effect –

Minneapolis’ Democrat leaders have reimagined public safety as utter terror. …

In response to the spiraling violence at Powderhorn Park, Commissioner Londel French urged people to get to know the vagrants and junkies:

There are some real issues about sanctuary, and I think the way we fix those issues are by having conversations with not only the neighbors and homeowners who live around Powderhorn, but some of the residents of the sanctuary and come up with some solutions to some of the issues that we’re having.

These hypothetical conversations could involve the drug dealing, prostitution, needles, stolen cars, bodily fluids, and other benefits of having a homeless encampment next door.

French, a Bernie Sanders supporter, had run for office vowing that he would use the Park Police to test out  –

… new ideas for how policing can engage our communities. Specifically, I will work to ensure that the Minneapolis Park Police use methods of restorative justice.

New ideas. Exciting prospect, reimagined public safety.

Anything new showing up yet? Is public safety better assured now? Is justice being or becoming restorative?

There’s been a small beginning:

The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board [MPRB] … began designing a new green uniform for park cops even as it turned the parks into violent hellholes.

The 33 officers of the park police don’t have their new uniforms yet, but its okay because they aren’t being called.

“MPRB staff are encountering unsafe situations in the evening with locking up the bathrooms” and the portable restroom provider announced that it wants police to be there when its employees service the bathrooms because “encampment residents are going through their vehicles”.

But everyone is pledged not to call the cops. So –

If the lefty activists want to defund the police, they’ll have to be the ones fixing the toilets. …

The reports also mentioned high concentrations of “biohazards”.

Still, Powderhorn Park is a model:

The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board of Commissioners declared that [all] the city’s parks were now “sanctuaries” for anyone who wanted to live in them. The resolution cited Governor Walz’s declaration of a “peacetime emergency” which banned removing homeless people from anywhere they wanted to be.

Since then, 38 more Minneapolis parks have been turned into tent cities … 

Will it be long before all the parks of Minnesota will be showcases of restorative justice?

All the parks of America?

While President Trump bears the heavy responsibility of dealing with a pandemic – and doing so very competently – the Democrats whinge and carp at every step he takes and sneer at him for everything he says. All their efforts are made with the object of obstructing and discrediting him. They don’t give a toss for the people they ache to govern.

In an article at Front Page titled America’s Superb Unappreciated President, John Perazzo writes:

The coordinated campaign of premeditated lies and smears that the Democrats and their media mouthpieces have been waging against President Trump ever since the word “coronavirus” first entered the American people’s consciousness, has been obscene. But there is something else that also needs to be addressed. Have you noticed that even now — after the life-and-death dangers inherent in the Democrats’ open-borders, catch-and-release immigration policies have been thoroughly laid bare by the current crisis — Democrats in public office have been utterly silent about those dangers? Have you noticed that they have not ventured even to speculate that perhaps President Trump’s pre-coronavirus warnings about the need to regulate our nation’s borders were well-founded and had absolutely nothing to do with racism?

This is because the Democrat narrative never changes in any significant way. It merely makes minor adjustments for the sake of political expediency. So because right now it would be politically inconvenient to link racism to the type of border security that is very obviously a matter of life-and-death for many Americans, the Democrats have simply found a new way of framing their “racism” charade. Thus have we heard one Democrat after another intone their latest mantra-of-the-moment: the notion that Trump’s use of the term “China [he says ‘Chinese’] virus” is damnable proof of his “racism”.

The Democratic Party has devolved into something quite diabolical. Its very considerable energies are now spent on little more than a constant stream of frenzied efforts to cover their political foes in rhetorical bird droppings. Aside from that, the party has nothing to offer the American people.

And Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness:

Trump once enraged liberal sensibilities by issuing travel bans against countries in the Middle East, Iran, Nigeria, and North Korea as they could not be trusted to audit their own departing citizens. His notion that nations have clearly defined and enforced borders was antithetical to the new norms that open borders and sanctuary cities were part of the global village of the 21st century.

Trump certainly distrusted globalization. He has waged a veritable multifront war against the overreach of transnational organizations, whether that be the European Union or the various agencies of the United Nations. Even relatively uncontroversial steps, such as greenlighting experimental drugs and off-label uses of old medicines for terminal patients drew the ire of federal bureaucrats and medical schools as potentially dangerous or irrelevant in cost-benefit analyses.

Yet since the outbreak of the virus, Trump’s idiosyncratic sixth sense has come in handy. The country is united in its furor at China—even if it is giving no credit to Trump for being years ahead of where it is now.

No longer is there a national debate over the evils of “protectionism” and “nationalism”, but rather over how quickly and effectively can the U.S. return the manufacturing of key medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, strategically vital technologies, and rare earth metals to American shores. Offshoring and outsourcing are now more likely synonymous with tragedy than smart investment strategies. …

When Trump issued the key January 31 travel ban that suddenly stopped the arrival of 15,000 visitors per day to the United States from China, the Left was as outraged as it had been with the ban against Libya, North Korea, and Iran. Candidates Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders saw an opening against their presumed 2020 opponent, and quickly sought to demagogue voters with “here-we-go-again” rhetoric that racist Trump is banning free travel of a marginalized people in his habitual “xenophobic” and “racist” fits. …

How odd that no prior critical major newspaper, network, or politician has now called for the end of such unnecessary and hurtful bans and the resumption of travel from China without further interruption …

We are learning, belatedly, that Trump was also rightly wary of transnationalism. The World Health Organization in the early weeks of the outbreak was mostly a paid-for Chinese megaphone. Its functionary director propagandized, on Chinese prompts, that the virus was likely not transmissible from human to human and that travel bans were ineffective and thus reflective of Trump’s repugnant views.

Americans were startled at how quickly the brotherhood of the European Union collapsed. Within days, individual countries were ignoring the Schengen open-borders rules and reinvented themselves as nations. None were eager to welcome in their neighbors. Few were willing to share medical supplies and key pharmaceuticals across ancient boundaries. …

The quite diverse manner in which Germany and Italy respectively reacted to the virus showed very little European commonality, but reflected that both were unique cultures and societies as they had been for centuries. …

Here at home, under the present lockdown conditions, Americans worry about finding their needed but long-ago outsourced prescriptions and medical supplies, but they are not so fearful of running out of food or fuel for their vehicles and heat for their homes. Was it good then to have demanded expansions of native gas and oil production, to have supported pipeline construction and more fracking and horizontal drilling? Was it in retrospect wise or foolish to have tried vehemently to stop California authorities from releasing precious state and federal reservoir water out to sea thereby shorting the irrigation contracts of the nation’s most important food producer?

At such times as these, was it smarter to trust in bureaucracies like the CDC to issue test kits or to encourage private enterprise to step forward and become creative producers?

… as President Trump has done.

Could counties and states adapt better to the local and regional differences of the virus’s manifestations than a monolithic federal government?

President Trump believes counties and states can adapt better to local needs.

[The president’s] suspicions about China and globalization, his distrust of bureaucratic regulations, his support for domestic production of key industries, his promotion of the interests of farmers and frackers, and his vehement opposition to increased gun control, all reflect a world view of national and self-independence, in which Americans can only count on themselves and their fellow citizens.

He has been right all along.

Yet still half the nation fails to appreciate that he is a superb president.

So at this moment, the day after Super Tuesday 2020, Joe Biden is the Democrats’ front runner for nomination as their presidential candidate.

He was never an intelligent man, and now he exhibits signs of being afflicted with senile dementia. He cannot remember where he is. He has said that he is running for election to the senate. He confuses his wife and his sister.  He cannot remember the wording of the Declaration of Independence when he wants to quote it. He forgets who it is he is talking to.

Could even Democrats really be so rash as to trust him with the nuclear button?

It’s very likely that the old Communist Bernie Sanders will overtake him.

So the Democrats’ choice will be between an old dunce who is corrupt and senile, and an old Communist who admires Stalin, Fidel Castro, the Nicaraguan regime of the Sandinistas and the vile men who brought Venezuela to ruin.

Happily, neither of them would be a threat to the re-election of President Trump with his record of unprecedented achievement, and whose popularity grows by the hour.

How pathetic, how worn out, how confused and asinine the Democratic Party has become. It’s well past its “sell-by” date. The oldest political party of modern times is itself senile, corrupt, and silly. Joe Biden is its perfect representative.

The 100 year old international movement towards collectivism, world government, wealth redistribution, anti-individualism, elitist rule over equalized serf populations – in two words, Left Progressivism – is coming to an end.

In an age when ever more people everywhere are literate, have access to information, can communicate with others anywhere, communal subjugation becomes ever less possible.

Sure there are a few countries where populations still suffer under communist tyranny, notably North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela – and China. It is because China is so badly governed that coronavirus, a new killing disease, has emerged from it and is spreading through the world. The harm will last for decades, but Left Progressivism is slowly but surely, and at an accelerating pace, failing and dying, coming to an end.

It has gone about as far as it can go. Victor Davis Hanson writes about its reaching its peak in America; a point from which its only further advance can be to oblivion:

In 2020 we have finally hit peak progressivism …

By that I mean the hard-left takeover of the Democratic Party and the accompanying progressive agenda now have reached an extreme—beyond which will only result in the steady erosion of radical ideology altogether. …

From 2009 through 2016, Barack Obama recalibrated the Democratic Party’s liberalism into progressive radicalism. He opened the border and all but dismantled existing immigration law. Sanctuary cities sprang up with impunity. Executive orders bypassed the Congress. The Iran Deal ignored the Senate’s treaty-making responsibilities. Obama sought to nationalize healthcare. The concept of “diversity” replaced affirmative action, by redefining racial oppression as distinct from historical grievance and economic disparity and instead lumping together 30 percent of the population as nonwhite, and thus antithetical to the new buzz construct of “white privilege”. Fast and Furious, the surveillance of the Associated Press reporters, Benghazi, the weaponization of the IRS, and the use of CIA, FBI, and DOJ to seed the spurious Steele dossier were all written off as proof of the “most scandal free” administration in memory.

But today Obamaism has been figuratively guillotined by the New Jacobins. It is found guilty of crimes of insufficient revolutionary zeal, as well as compromises with the U.S. Constitution and capitalism.

Once considered a crank socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) now leads in many Democratic primary polls. Arriving with him at this moment in our politics is peak progressivism.

First-term socialists—House representatives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and her fellow “squad” members, inspired by Sanders—now set the new Democratic agenda. And it is one that is more radical than anything seen in modern American history and largely unsustainable: calls to level a wealth tax and new top income-tax rates of 70-90 percent, to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service, all student debt, an enforceable southern border, the internal combustion engine, and most Second Amendment rights, and to enact multi-trillion dollar new entitlements as outlined in the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free college, free healthcare for illegal aliens, and reparations.

Identity politics so rules the rhetoric of the new progressive party that all of its—exclusively white—primary finalists vie to be most vocal in the ritual damning of their own country (that has ironically ensured their own influence, power, success and wealth) as inherently “racist”.

Outside of the political sphere, peak progressivism had reinvented the university, rejecting Martin Luther King, Jr’s vision of racial integration and assimilation, by demanding racially obsessed dorms, safe spaces, and applications.

There is hardly a First Amendment on campuses anymore. Speakers with unpopular views are shouted down with impunity by student activists. “Trigger warnings” seek to censor required texts. The mere accusation of sexual harassment on campus is synonymous with the suspension of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments. Skepticism over abortion, “climate change”, or identity politics can cancel out a faculty career.

It is hard to imagine where universities go after peak progressivism, since it would be the pure nihilism of abolishing grades, admissions standards, and student fees.

Peak progressivism calls for the abolition of the constitutionally mandated Electoral College. Radicals now fault past failed schemes to pack the federal and Supreme Court with left-wing justices only because they failed, and thus advance ways to make court-packing work in the present. The bolder among them wants to reconfigure the U.S. Senate into a proportionally representational house or abolish it altogether.

All that would be left after that would be the formal abolition of the U.S. Constitution itself.

Primary candidates compete with one another to water down voting laws, variously demanding that 16-year-olds, felons, and illegal aliens should be given the franchise.

The now far-Left Democrats fail to see that when their hopes for election lie, as they do, with criminals, lunatics, illegal aliens and the immature, there is something wrong with their policies.

Gay marriage, which Obama opposed in 2008 and later promoted after reelection, is now passé. The new civil rights cause celebre is transgenderism, an ancient syndrome known in the past under a variety of clinical definitions that affects less than half of one percent of the population. Who, after these peak progressive ideas, would be left as ineligible to vote—12-year-olds, those on death row, the rest of the earth’s population?

All moderate Democratic presidential candidates long ago dropped out. Those who have not, such as Joe Biden and Michael Bloomberg, are in virtual reeducation camps, as they promise to progressive rivals and the media to renounce most of their past positions, effusively apologizing for prior incorrect thinking and failure to become sufficiently “woke”. …

The much-discussed “intersectionality” is a construct, a myth. The history of ideological extremism is instead a war of all factions against one another.

We see just that in the peak progressive primaries. Michael Bloomberg is deemed a racist and sexist. But then so is Joe Biden. Bernie Sanders supposedly hires racists and sexists and won’t honor minimum wage laws. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) thinks Bernie is condescending to women and minorities. Pete Buttigieg thinks he is the victim of Joe Biden’s subtle anti-gay political adds, and feels, but does not articulate, that the black community is inherently anti-homosexual. The race to tag others as victimizers and selves as victimized is endless.

Radicals also vie to make rivals look counter-revolutionary, as they advance ever more incoherent and unhinged schemes without a clue that they are losing not just moderate support but even liberal followers. The more Warren feels she must become the purest peak progressive on the debate stage and the most radical in the U.S. Senate, the more her former supporters feel she is either a conniving opportunist or nuts or both. …

Peak progressives cannot possibly live up to their rhetoric fantasies and so suffer from rank hypocrisies. Redistributionists like Warren and Sanders either fly on private jets or choose non-egalitarian first-class commercial. Hollywood stars who mouth crazy [socialist, egalitarian] Oscar and Grammy ceremony platitudes vie with each other to wear multi-thousand-dollar clothes, live in mansions, and own yachts—as they drive down ratings to historic lows.

Not long ago, progressive pundits on CNN and MSNBC declared the current indicted lawyer Michael Avenatti presidential material for his fabrications and lies that were used to smear Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Where does a network go after that? …

It is not only “hard to imagine where universities go after peak progressivism”, or where the networks can “go after that”; it is impossible to see a destination for the Left itself, in America or anywhere else in the world.

Except to extinction.   

Nancy Pelosi, Democrat Speaker of the House of Representatives and official leader of the campaign to destroy President Trump by impeaching him, furiously denied to a reporter that she hates Donald Trump when he asked her if she did:

“I don’t hate anybody,” responded Pelosi. “I was raised in a Catholic house. We don’t hate anybody, not anybody in the world. Don’t accuse me of hate.”

Being accused of hatred was, in Pelosi’s mind, the same as accusing her of being a bad Catholic.

“As a Catholic, I resent your using the word ‘hate’ in a sentence that addresses me,” she said. “I don’t hate anyone.”

Hatred was not part of her upbringing, she said. “I was raised in a way that is a heart full of love.”

On the contrary, she said, she always prays for the president. “I still pray for the president. I pray for the president all the time.”

How deeply reassuring for the president. (And the reporter – a rare one to provoke Speaker Pelosi! – must have felt warmly loved too.)

But in Reality, for the last four years, the Democrats, the Left everywhere, and the media have been spewing hatred of Donald Trump non-stop, night and day. They hate him.

It’s not that they merely don’t like what he stands for, what he does or how he does it. They certainly don’t, and they would be against anyone who stood for the same and did the same. But their intense hatred is plainly for the man himself.  

The hatred is totally irrational, and for those of us who much admire and like President Trump, impossible to understand. Is their hatred motivated by envy? Can they not bear it that Donald Trump is a successful businessman, a billionaire, a TV star, and on top of it all, president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world? And he has a very beautiful wife. And successful children. How dare he?

They – the politicians, the celebrities, the globalists, the socialists, the America-haters, the intersectionalists, the feminists, the environmentalists, the climate alarmists, the Antifa activists, the professors, the media hacks – hate him with a hatred that drives them to any length in their effort to destroy him. For days, weeks, months, years on end they rage against him in the House and the Senate. They make up absurd lies about him. There is no accusation, however farfetched, however unlikely, however ridiculous, however crazy, however impossible that they have not or will not level against him, over and over again.

Has there ever before been so much hate speech poured out against an elected American leader?  

No matter how much good he does for the country – and he has done a lot; no matter how competent he is – and he is highly competent; no matter how generous he is – and he is generous, even giving away his salary: they hate him, hate him, hate him. They want him thrown out of office; they want him humiliated; they want him tortured; they want him dead. 

To help them achieve his ruin, to help them advance the great cause of destroying Donald Trump, the media (most of them) lie about him. They spread misinformation, disinformation, scurrilous rumors, obscene tales, filthy smears.   

And at the same time they all – the politicians, the celebrities, the globalists, the socialists, the America-haters, the intersectionalists, the feminists, the environmentalists, the climate alarmists, the Antifa actvists, the professors, the media hacks – ceaselessly rail against “hate speech and disinformation”.

What they mean by “hate speech” is the expression of any opinion that differs from their own. And by “disinformation” they mean any contradiction, any disproof, any exposure of their lies.

They want “hate speech and disinformation” stopped. Pronto. It’s intolerable to them that people go on saying things they don’t like. It’s too provoking! People .. people … do it, go on and on doing it, in the “social media”. Freely. Saying whatever they like. No regulation. No punishment. Good grief, they behave as if the United States of America were Liberty Hall!

We quote parts of an article by Paul Bradford at American Greatness:

 Joe Biden wants to punish Facebook and Twitter so they will censor more.

Biden endorsed one of the most aggressive proposals against Big Tech last week in an interview with the New York Times. He wants to eliminate Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects tech platforms from publisher liabilities.

“Section 230 should be revoked, immediately should be revoked, number one,” Biden said. “For [Mark] Zuckerberg [CEO of Facebook] and other platforms.”

“It should be revoked because [Facebook] is not merely an internet company,” Biden said. “It is propagating falsehoods they know to be false, and we should be setting standards not unlike the Europeans are doing relative to privacy. You guys still have editors. I’m sitting with them. Not a joke. There is no editorial impact at all on Facebook. None. None whatsoever. It’s irresponsible. It’s totally irresponsible.”

Biden also won’t rule out criminal penalties for Zuckerberg over alleged collusion with the Russian government.

Biden, it needs to be borne in mind, was vice president when Barack Obama was president and they were colluding with the Russians.

He implied the Facebook executive is selling out American democracy to foreign tyrants for cold hard cash.

Biden, it should also be borne in mind, and through him his brothers and his son and his sister and his son-in-law, corruptly raked in cold hard cash, much of it from foreign tyrants, by the million when he was vice-president. He sold his office.

Biden is particularly upset with the number of ads Trump runs on Facebook.

He sees a terrible risk that if Trump is allowed to do that, he could get himself re-elected! Why can’t Zuckerberg and the other tech giants see what danger they’re running America into?

Nearly every Democratic presidential candidate, both former and current, wants to punish tech companies for allowing “hate speech” and “disinformation” on their platforms.

Three candidates besides Biden want to target Section 230. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wants to look into Section 230 to make sure “right-wing groups don’t abuse regulation to advance their agenda” and that tech platforms censor hate speech. He doesn’t call for the outright elimination of Section 230 but his meaning is plain enough.

Similarly, Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), a forgotten presidential candidate, wants to revise Section 230 to hold Big Tech accountable for “misinformation and hate speech on their platforms”.

The other candidates also want to pressure Big Tech to censor more, but haven’t specifically mentioned Section 230. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wants to break up Facebook and other tech giants as punishment for “profiting off of hate speech and disinformation campaigns”.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg says his administration would investigate and call out platforms that “traffic in hate and encourage or fail to moderate abuse and hate”. Buttigieg wants more aggressive measures to suppress ads that liberals deem to be erroneous.

Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), another former presidential candidate, also wants Big Tech punished for alleged hate speech. “We will hold social media platforms responsible for the hate infiltrating their platforms, because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy,” she told the NAACP last year.

No matter who wins the Democratic nomination, that candidate will demand more online censorship. Every major candidate sees what they call “hate speech” as something that should not be protected by the First Amendment. Every single one of them wants to use state power to push Facebook, Twitter and other platforms into only allowing liberal discourse.

In fact, in Reality – the sphere where Leftists do not like to live – conservatives are constantly being censored, suspended, rebuked, and outright banned by the Powers that govern the internet. Every one of those Powers is Left-biased. But some conservative opinion does get published to the world, and how can the Left, and especially those in it who have been raised in a way that fills their hearts with love, be expected to tolerate such a state of affairs?

Not hope and change. Or if change, not for what we would call the better.

The Bernie Sanders campaign is, however, excited by the prospect of being able to inflict misery on persons so wicked as to have earned a lot of money, or to vote for Donald Trump; and violence on any who oppose Comrade Bernie for the Democrats’ presidential candidacy.

Breitbart reports:

An undercover video published by Project Veritas … shows a field organizer for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign saying Soviet gulags were actually a positive phenomenon, suggesting that some similar program could re-educate Trump supporters and billionaires.

The video begins with a Project Veritas journalist asking an individual identified as Sanders organizer Kyle Jurek if “MAGA people” could be re-educated if Sanders wins the White House. “We gotta try,” Jurek replies. …

In another part of the video, Jurek is seen discussing Soviet Union dictator Joseph Stalin’s use of gulags, where he claims that the CIA was overly critical of them. “People were actually paid a living wage in the gulags. They have conjugal visits in gulags. Gulags were meant for re-education,” he says.

Jurek is then seen suggesting that the most effective way to re-educate the billionaire class is to order them to “break rocks for 12 hours a day”.

Jurek uses “the f word” a lot. We substitute stars:

“The greatest way to break a ******* billionaire of their privilege and their idea that they’re superior, go and break rocks for 12 hours a day. You’re now a working class person, and you’re going to ******* learn what that means, right?”

The video also shows Jurek warning that Milwaukee, host of this year’s Democratic National Convention, will “burn” if Sanders fails to win the party’s nomination. “If Bernie doesn’t get the nomination or it goes to a second round at the DNC convention, ******* Milwaukee will burn,” says Jurek. “It’ll start in Milwaukee and then when the police push back on that, other sites will ******* explode.”

The footage concludes with Jurek issuing the chilling prediction that Milwaukee could see riots akin to the 1968 convention in Chicago, where left-wing activists engaged in violent riots in the streets.

“Be ready to be in Milwaukee for the DNC convention. We’re going to make 1968 look like a *******girl’s scout ******* cookout,” warns the Sanders field organizer. “The cops are going to be the ones ******* beaten in Milwaukee.”

This cussing sadist Jurek will not have read, would not read, probably does not know of the existence of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: an Experiment in Literary Investigation. We suspect that even if he did read it, it would not make him change his mind about condemning people to gulags. But for those less unshakable in their admiration for Communism, less inspired by the Russian practice of it, here’s a small taste* of what the book has to teach readers and writers in the West:

How to describe the perturbation of a human soul placed in a cell filled to twenty times its capacity and with no latrine bucket? The texture of this life [in the Gulag] is bound to be quite unknown to Western writers; they wouldn’t conceive of the solution – to urinate in your canvas hood or your boot. Ah, with what psychological twists and turns Western writers could enrich their literature if they only knew about the scheme of things in that Minusinsk Prison: there was only one food bowl for every four slave prisoners; and one mug of drinking water per day. And it could happen that one of the four sharers contrived to use the vessel allotted to him and three others to relieve his internal pressure and then refuse to allow  his daily water ration to wash it out. What a conflict! What a clash of four personalities! What nuances! And I am not joking. That is when the rock bottom of a human being is revealed. Months in such a cell and a human being, though he may escape being shot under Yezhov and may even be rehabilitated under Khrushchev, will live in ruined health for the rest of his life. …

In Minusinsk prison in 194-, after the prisoners hadn’t been taken into the fresh air for a whole year, they had forgotten to walk, to breathe, to look at the light. And then they took then out, put them in formation, and herded them the fifteen miles to Abakan on foot. About a dozen of them died along the way. And no one is ever going to write a great novel about it, not even one chapter: if you live in a graveyard, you can’t weep for everyone.

Like the good communists who ran the gulags, this Jurek – and Bernie Sanders himself who honeymooned in the Communist paradise that Solzhenitsyn describes – would no doubt be happy to say to the billionaires and Trump voters they would condemn to imprisonment:

“In the prison camp, nothing belongs to you. Here in camp we have communism. Forward march!”

Upon which Solzhenitsyn comments:

And if it was “communism” then what was there to object to? Communism, after all, is what they had dedicated their lives to.

Solzhenitsyn himself did actually write a  great novel about life in a gulag prison. It is called One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. We advise billionaires who intend to vote for Bernie Sanders – yes, you lot in Silicon Valley – to read it so you can be prepared for what might be in store for you.

Here is a video showing photographs of life in the Soviet gulag prisons. Also watch the video that follows it, continuing with the same subject.

https://youtu.be/PzxBDWkwKWg

The founder of Project Veritas, James O’Keefe, has released the footage of the interview with Kyle Jurek on Tuesday January 14, 2020, and says that several more videos will follow “as part of the group’s ‘Expose2020’ campaign”.

*I have used the translation by Thomas P. Whitney (Collins and Harvill Press, London] as a basis for my own phrasing in part. The quotations come from pages 541-542 and page 584. The emphasis is in the original – ed.

What is most pleasing, amusing, and propitious about the Democratic candidates’ campaigns for the presidency, is that the candidates themselves are … well ….

And …

And is unofficially led by Congresswomen who hate Jews, which Sanders and Bloomberg – regretfully and apologetically? – are:

Which leaves them with Joe Biden who is rapidly lapsing into senile dementia:

Sweden, much admired by Bernie Sanders and others on the Left as a model “democratic socialist” country, is not socialist like Venezuela. It tried socialism, found it didn’t work, “turned sharply back toward capitalism” round the middle of the 1990s, and regained prosperity. It is still a highly taxed welfare state.

The Swedes were happy with that, and decided in Christian spirit to share their happiness with tens of thousands of aliens from the Third World. They came from the hot lands of Africa and Asia to the north of Europe, with its long cold winter nights.

Judith Bergman writes at Gatestone about what happened to Sweden when it welcomed a “large influx of people [read Muslims] who do not have the educational or language skills to work in the Swedish economy”.

The small Swedish city of Filipstad exemplifies a place where the influx of non-Western migrants, some of them illiterate, with little or no education, has meant that the unemployment rate in that group is at 80%: they depend for their livelihoods on the municipality’s social welfare program.

In 2015, during the European migration crisis, nearly 163,000 migrants arrived in Sweden seeking asylum – primarily from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq …  60,000 received a residence permit. In the group of people over the age of 15, made up of 40,019 people, only 4,574 get their livelihood from employment … 18,405 people from the cohort live on welfare handed out by municipalities and 9,970 people receive funds for studying.

Many municipalities … need to make budget cuts. In Ystad, in the south of Sweden, the municipality, as part of the services of the welfare state, [has been helping] the elderly with hot meals and cleaning services. Now, to save money, the municipality will no longer serve hot meals to the elderly and cleaning services will be limited to once every three weeks. The elderly will instead have to get ready-made meals from the supermarket. …

Motala municipality … announced that it would lower the heat in buildings managed by the city, including old age homes, to save money. “We will take care of the elderly; they will not be freezing, they can have blankets,” the message went.

The criticism of the proposed savings on care for the elderly in Motala, however, was so massive that the municipality had to back down. …

Meanwhile, in June, the Swedish parliament voted in favor of a law that is likely to increase immigration to Sweden based on family reunification.

 Alert capitalists will be buying shares in the blanket industry.

There cannot be a “right” for one person that puts an obligation on another person.

There cannot be a “right” for everyone that puts an obligation on some people.

A “right” to health care imposes an obligation on medical practitioners.

Yet the Democratic candidates for the November 2020 presidential election believe that medical treatment is a “human right”.

That old Communist from way back, Bernie Sanders – elected to the Senate as an Independent but running for the presidency as a Democrat – explicitly insists that it is.

Dr. Kevin Pham writes at the Daily Signal:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was recently on comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show to discuss … his vision for health care in America.

He calls his plan “Medicare for All”.

In one interesting statement, Sanders described the rollout of his plan: “I want to expand Medicare to include dental care, hearing aids, and eyeglasses, and then what I want to do is lower the eligibility age the first year from 65 down to 55, then to 45, then to 35, then we cover everybody.”

Cover? Covered by insurance? No. “Free” health care for all would not be paid for through a system of insurance. It would be paid for through taxes. Doctors, nurses, paramedics, all health care workers would be employees of the government.

The plan, Dr. Pham points out, is more accurately called “Medicaid for All”.

[It] would cost over $30 trillion in the next 10 years in ideal conditions …

So probably very much more …

… but still require physicians and providers to take a pay cut of up to 40% and continue working with the same productivity.

And of course a great many more of them would be needed.

Physicians are already heavily burdened with their workload. In the 2018 Physicians Foundation survey, up to 80% of physicians reported working at their maximum capacity or beyond.

In the same survey, about 15% of physicians reported limiting the number of Medicaid patients they see and an additional 16% did not see Medicaid patients at all.

Of these physicians who do not see Medicaid patients, or limit the number they see, over a third are in primary care, exactly the kind of physicians we need in greater numbers.

[But] … a combination of administrative burdens, delays in processing claims, and low reimbursement rates make it difficult to justify seeing many Medicaid patients.

As Medicaid and Medicare both drastically underpay relative to private health insurance, hospitals and providers have to charge private insurance more to make up the difference.

Under Bernie Sanders’s scheme (and Elizabeth Warren’s vague and colossally expensive plan), there would no private insurance and “the whole system would crumble”.

Providers who participate in Medicaid must accept the government-mandated prices for services and deal with oftentimes long delays in receiving reimbursement that is below the cost of practice. 

Study hard for years at great expense only to earn a pittance? (Oh, I nearly forgot – higher education will also be “free” in that it will be paid for by taxation. Your pathetic little income will be taxed at so high a rate that you’ll be left with nothing but a little pocket-money.)

You would have to be a fanatical philanthropist, or even a masochist, to enter the medical profession under such conditions.

And we haven’t even touched on all the miseries a tax-payer funded national health service inevitably brings to patients – the long waits, the rationing, the overcrowding, the death panels …