Opinions we agree with from American Greatness

Theodore Roosevelt Malloch writes: Kamala Harris personifies identity politics gone wild. The records show as California attorney general, Harris put more than 1,500, mostly poor, black and brown men in jail for smoking or possessing pot. But then she laughed about smoking weed in college while listening to Tupac Shakur, who, strangely, would not release his debut album for another five years. Oh, well, caught again in deceit. Kamala Harris has built a monumental career out of hypocrisy and dishonesty. The soon-to-be president sets new low standards even for a politician. One thing she does consistently is to oppose the constitutional rights of individuals, on speech, on assembly, on bearing arms, on fair trials, on just about everything. Kamala—and please pronounce her first name correctly or you will be in really big trouble—the now future president of the United States, a chief cackler well beyond the novice abilities of a Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi, is—make no mistake—a woke authoritarian.  Her phoniness is fraudulence in spades. But her cackle? Pure evil.

Debra Heine writes about Joe Biden’s choice to lead the Department of Justice’s enormously powerful Civil Rights Division: a nasty woman named Kristen Clarke. She has a history of pushing a radical, anti-white, anti-Semitic, anti-police agenda; defending Jussie Smollett’s vicious lie about being attacked by Trump supporters (when he actually paid two Nigerians to pretend to do it); and claiming Blacks are superior to Whites because the more melanin you have in your body the smarter you are. She fervently insists on the innocence of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the convicted murderer of police officer Danny Faulkner.

What hope do normal Americans have of justice when people like this are given power over them?

Many of the richest people in the world live in California. The “tech giants” of Silicon Valley have not only made billions of dollars for themselves, the wealth they have created has benefited billions of other people in their state, their country, the world.

Had they been living under socialism, they could not have become rich and could not have created wealth.

Yet almost to a man and woman they vote for their state to be governed by socialists.

So do most Californians.

Under the socialist state government and city councils, great cities – most notoriously Los Angeles and San Francisco – have become filthy stinking disease-ridden high-crime shitholes.

San Francisco in 2019

Productive citizens are heavily taxed to provide the means to support the unproductive street-dwellers; so thousands of tax-payers are leaving the state to escape from the government most of them voted for, while more and more vagabonds, drug-addicts, lunatics, illegal aliens and criminals pour in from everywhere.

You can see what the result must be. Only the rulers, led by Nicolás Maduro Gavin Newsom, cannot see it. Or perhaps it’s what they passionately desire.

Now the governing socialists, to make sure that new generations will continue to vote for a life-style characterized by filth, disease, ignorance, dependence, misery and death, are planning their indoctrination with ever more outrageous dogma.

Parents beware!

Dr. Susan Berry writes at Breitbart:

The California Education Department’s model Ethnic Studies Curriculum plans to teach children capitalism is a “system of power” and “oppression”, equal to “white supremacy”, “patriarchy”, and “racism”. 

The model curriculum … defines ethnic studies as “the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with an emphasis on experiences of people of color in the United States”. …

It relies on language the radical left now considers essential to achieve its political goals.

Get ready for spadesful of gobbledygook.

For example, the introduction of the document uses the term “hxrstory”, instead of “history”, in keeping with the gender ideology that states “womxn” must not be defined in terms of their relation to men.

According to the model curriculum, “Ethnic studies is xdisciplinary”, and its writers add:

Ethnic Studies is about people whose cultures, hxrstories, and social positionalities are forever changing and evolving. Thus, Ethnic Studies also examines borders, borderlands, mixtures, hybridities, nepantlas, double consciousness, and reconfigured articulations, even within and beyond the various names and categories associated with our identities. People do not fit neatly into boxes, and identity is complex.

Complex, eh? So it seems, and getting more so by the minute!

One of the recommended methods of teaching the Ethnic Studies model curriculum to K-12 students is through “democratizing the classroom”.

“Ethnic Studies educators democratize their classrooms by creating a learning environment where both students and teachers are equal active participants in the co-constructing knowledge,” the writers state, enabling “students to be recognized and valued as knowledge producers alongside their educators, while simultaneously placing an emphasis on the development of democratic values and collegiality.”

The writers of the Ethnic Studies model curriculum say their goal is to:

… equip all students with the skills and knowledge to think critically about the world around them and to tell their own stories, empower students to be engaged socially and politically, enable students to develop a deep appreciation for cultural diversity and inclusion, and aids in the eradication of bigotry, hate, and racism.

Williamson Evers, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, writes in an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal that the California document –

… includes faddish social-science lingo like “cis-heteropatriarchy” that may make sense to radical university professors and activists but doesn’t mean much to the regular folks who send their children to California’s public schools.

And –

It is difficult to comprehend the depth and breadth of the ideological bias and misrepresentations without reading the whole curriculum—something few will want to do.

Most of the role models are murderers and terrorists:

Teachers are encouraged to cite the biographies of “potentially significant figures” such as Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon and Bobby Seale. Convicted cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur are also on the list. Students are taught that the life of George Jackson matters “now more than ever”. Jackson, while in prison, became “a revolutionary warrior for Black liberation and prison reform”. The Latino section’s people of significance include Puerto Rican nationalists Oscar López Rivera, a member of a paramilitary group that carried out more than 130 bomb attacks, and Lolita Lebrón, who was convicted of attempted murder in a group assault that wounded five congressmen.

This goes to a hell deeper than Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, Maduroism.

This is revolutionary anarchism. 

Is it likely or unlikely that the Democratic Party, if it were to gain full federal legislative and executive power with both houses of Congress and the presidency, would follow where California leads?

*

The proposed Californian curriculum is also blatantly and unashamedly anti-Semitic.

We summarize part of an article by Jonathan Tobin:

The model ethnic-studies curriculum by the Californian board of education proposes a course of study about Arabs that views the Palestinian war on Israel from the point of view of those who wish to destroy it. Jews are depicted as bloodthirsty villains victimizing Palestinians. The curriculum does not soft-pedal its bias against Jews. Israel is depicted as a colonial settler state whose creation was a “disaster”, and those who fight against it, including figures who are open about their anti-Semitism, such as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), activist Linda Sarsour and the late academic Edward Said, as heroes and role models to be emulated. The curriculum is a product not merely of the successful efforts of a handful of influential anti-Israel academics, but of the “intersectional” – ie. racist – ideology of the Left that spawned them.

Lynne Stewart is to go to prison for 28 months.

A Clinton-appointed liberal judge considers that sufficient punishment for her crime, which was, in simple truth, treason against the United States of America.

Many on the left admire her. (It is the patriot Sarah Palin whom they hate and scorn.)

The following, from the Norfolk Crime Examiner, San Francisco, provides some details of the case and a profile of this despicable woman:

On Tuesday, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan ordered convicted criminal defense attorney Lynne Stewart to begin her prison sentence, as the court upheld her 2005 conviction for aiding imprisoned terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman.

Despite the conviction for such a serious crime, Stewart had been allowed to remain free for the last four years, while her appeal was pending. During that time, she made speeches and numerous public appearances in which she often thumbed her nose at the country she betrayed, while describing terrorists as “liberationists.“

On February 10, 2005, Lynne Stewart was found guilty of conspiracy, providing material support to terrorists and defrauding the federal government. Stewart was contacting al-Gamma’a al-Islamiyya (The Islamic Group) on behalf of Abdel-Rahman. In addition to master-minding the 1993 plot to bomb the World Trade Center which killed six people and left more than 1,000 injured, the blind sheik was convicted of planning to destroy other New York City targets including the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the United Nations building, and the George Washington bridge. The Islamic Group dubbed the multiple target attack plan “The Day of Terror.” …

Lynne Stewart knowingly aided a convicted terrorist and avowed enemy of the United States during a time of war and deserves to be executed for her crimes. …

Lynne Stewart aided Rahman’s communications with his followers and even personally issued decries on his behalf. Stewart had defended Rahman in his 1995 trial and continued to visit Rahman in prison. Apparently at some point, Stewart ended her role as his lawyer and began one as his co-conspirator. …

Under the guise of giving legal counsel, Stewart helped pass along a fatwah from Rahman to his followers which commanded: “brother scholars everywhere in the Muslim world to do their part and issue a unanimous fatwah that urges the Muslim nations to fight the Jews and to kill them wherever they are.” …

In Rahman’s 1995 trial, Stewart argued that issuing the order to destroy the World Trade Center was merely a necessary part of his religious duties as a Muslim leader. After Rahman was sentenced to life in prison plus an additional 65 years, Stewart was seen weeping uncontrollably inside the courtroom.

Federal prosecutors filed court papers which said Stewart’s crime was in fact, “egregious, flagrant abuse of her profession, abuse that amounted to material support to a terrorist group, which deserves to be severely punished.”

Amazingly, while U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl said Stewart’s actions could have had “potentially lethal consequences” and represented “extraordinarily severe criminal conduct,” the Clinton-appointed judge waited until October 2006 to sentence Stewart…A full 20 months after her conviction.

Though Stewart could have received a 30 year sentence under federal guidelines (which the prosecution sought), Judge Koeltl only sentenced her to 28 months. In an insulting move to the victims of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he has even allowed her to remain free while her appeal is pending. …

Lynne Stewart seems to have a particular affinity for murderers and enemies of the state. Over her career, she has defended Black Panther Willie Holder, Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin, Philadelphia cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, and mafia hit-man Sammy “The Bull” Gravano. Stewart has even expressed a desire to defend Osama bin Laden.

In a 2003 speech to the National Lawyers Guild, Stewart listed Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and Mao Tse Tung as “heroes.”

In 2002, Stewart told reporter Susie Day of Monthly Review: “I don’t have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous. Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people’s revolution.”

She went on to talk about her client Abdel-Rahman, by saying: “Now, certainly somebody like Sheikh Omar, who was a world figure, someone who was listened to by the entire Muslim population for being a very learned scholar, deserved to have a platform, deserved not to be entombed in the middle of America and not able to speak. They said the Sheikh was responsible for, I dunno, everything except flat feet. They made it sound like a worldwide conspiracy… He’s a blind, elderly, sick man. He may be a spiritual head …  But he’s certainly not a combatant in any sense whatsoever.” …

Though she has been disbarred, Stewart has become a regular speaker at several law schools. In 2003, one such event at Oregon’s Portland State University Law School was billed as “Lynne Stewart vs. John Ashcroft.” Another engagement at the Arizona State University School of Law was entitled “Emphatically Not Guilty.” A Stanford University speech was canceled by Law School dean Kathleen Sullivan, when she learned of Stewart’s advocacy of violence.

Stewart is certainly not without her admirers. According to the IRS, left-wing activist George Soros gave Stewart a $20,000 donation for her legal defense. In addition to money, Stewart also receives honors. In 2003, the law students at City University of New York voted to honor her with that school’s Public Interest Lawyer of the Year award. However, once news of the award was picked up by the press, the dean thought better of it and rescinded the offer.

Stewart has remained defiant and filled with hatred for the United States. Stewart’s official website (www.LynneStewart.org) states that her prosecution is “an obvious attempt by the U.S. government to silence dissent, curtail vigorous defense lawyers and instill fear in those who would fight against the U.S. government’s racism.”…

Stewart is as hypocritical as she is unrepentant. She has said that she approves of Fidel Castro “locking up” dissidents, but complains that the U.S. government has prosecuted her to “silence dissent.” Apparently, imprisonment is fine when communists use it against those who speak out for their freedom, but somehow wrong when it is used by a democratic republic against their enemies.

However, while Stewart seems to relish the role of dissident martyr, she is neither a dissident, nor is she a martyr. She is in fact, a convicted felon who has aided and abetted a terrorist leader and his organization. Period.

It is more than outrageous that Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean who sat in prison for two years, for shooting a drug smuggler, were not allowed to remain free while their appeals were pending (as is customary for law enforcement officers charged with crimes relating to the performance of their job), though Lynne Stewart who knowingly and willfully gave aid to a terrorist was given that courtesy.

While a lengthy sentence for someone who has colluded with the enemy during a time of war is of course not without precedence, it is also not without precedence that one could be put to death for this crime. Had Lynne Stewart committed her crime during World War II or even the early days of the Cold War, she would have undoubtedly been hanged for her actions.

Stewart however, has been the beneficiary of a federal bench heavy with left-leaning judges and a political climate which now has a great tolerance for what our parents and grandparents knew to be treason.

Every single day which Lynne Stewart was allowed to give speeches, talk to magazines, attend swanky dinners for some leftist cause, and sign autographs for adoring college students was a terrible affront not only to those who were killed and maimed in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, but to every man and woman who has ever fought and died for this country.