Putin has the last laugh

Vladimir Putin has taunted Britain after Sergei Skripal's release from hospital - suggesting the Russian spy would have 'died on the spot' if he had been attacked with a military-grade toxin.

Mr Skripal is being protected by 24-hour armed guard at an MI5 safe house after leaving hospital earlier this week, sources have revealed.

The 66-year-old, and his daughter Yulia, 33, were admitted to Salisbury District Hospital along with Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey after being exposed to the nerve agent in March.

Britain has accused Russia of being behind the poisoning, saying it was caused by a type of nerve agent known as Novichok which was developed in the Soviet Union.

Putin wished Skripal 'good health' during a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel today. But he added: 'God grant him good health... If a military-grade poison had been used, the man would have died on the spot. Thank God he recovered and that he left (hospital).'

Putin then accused Britain of failing to respond to the Kremlin's offer of help with the investigation. 'We have several times offered our British partners any necessary assistance in the investigation (of the poisoning). So far we have received no response. Our offer remains open,' he said.

Mr Skripal, who nearly died after being exposed to the deadly nerve agent novichok, was discharged earlier this week and was whisked to an undisclosed location.

His daughter Yulia, who was also poisoned and left gravely ill, left hospital last month.

Today, Russia's ambassador to the UK stepped up demands to be allowed to see the pair, suggesting they may be being detained by the British state.

Alexander Yakovenko said the pair were 'isolated', adding: 'You can call it kidnap.'

He welcomed the announcement that former spy Mr Skripal had been discharged from hospital. But Mr Yakovenko has claimed the UK is violating international law by not granting access to the Skripals.

The 1963 Vienna Convention gives consular officials access rights if one of their nationals is in prison, custody or detention.

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School Shooter Found Carrying Communist Symbol

Details about the alleged perpetrator of Friday’s school shooting are beginning to emerge, and they seem to dismantle leftist narratives about gun violence.

At least nine people were killed during an attack at Santa Fe High School in Texas. Authorities have confirmed that part of the criminal’s plot involved makeshift bombs most likely constructed from pressure cookers, and at least one armed police officer engaged the shooter at the school.

That suspected criminal has now been taken into custody and revealed as a 17-year-old student. As journalists poured over the alleged shooter’s social media accounts, they found something chilling.

It appears that the shooter proudly wore a piece of pro-Communist propaganda on his clothing as he carried out the attack.

Photos and descriptions from the accused criminal’s Facebook page show an unmistakable Soviet “hammer and sickle” pin placed prominently on the lapel of his jacket — the same jacket that witnesses said he wore during the rampage.

The “hammer and sickle” is the exact same symbol used by many far-left anti-Trump activists, including “Antifa.”

Metro UK newspaper published screenshots of the suspect’s account and showed a red Socialist star with the hammer and sickle. The student’s own description confirmed what the pin meant. “Duster Hammer and Sickle = Rebellion,” he wrote.

The star pin appeared to be identical or similar to items available from MarxistBooks.com and other pro-socialist propaganda outlets.

More recently, the symbol has become the de facto icon of radical anti-Trump protesters. There are numerous examples of liberal protesters waving the hammer and sickle flag or using the iconography on banners protesting the president and conservatism.

It appears that wearing the trench coat with its pro-socialist propaganda was common for the alleged shooter.

“Dustin Severin, a 17-year-old student, told local NBC affiliate KPRC that he saw (the shooter) in the hallway shortly before the bullets started flying — and that he was wearing his usual outfit,” reported NBC.

“He wears a trench coat every day, and it’s like 90 degrees out here,” the witness said.

The jacket also had other pins, including a rising sun that symbolizes “kamikaze tactics,” and Baphomet, an idol of the Occult that is associated with evil.

More details about the shooter and this horrible crime will emerge over the coming days. What is already clear, however, is that this was a disturbed person bent on carrying out harm … and the liberal media’s narratives about conservatives being to blame for these crimes just does not hold water.

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My Country or My Tribe?

The real divide in America? The Right believes the Left is wrong. The Left believes the Right is evil.

“Tribalism, it’s always worth remembering, is not one aspect of human experience. It’s the default human experience.” —columnist Andrew Sullivan in 2017

If one were to believe much of the Leftmedia’s take, America was a reasonable nation until Donald Trump was elected. Yet the tribalism we now call identity politics has been nurtured for decades, engendered by the change from one simple idea to another: a nation once urged to embrace assimilation in all its “melting pot” permutations became one where “celebrating our differences” was deemed the more enlightened approach.

It was a total fraud.

One that is reaching epic proportions. Did we really have a presidential candidate willing to completely dismiss millions of Americans as “deplorables” simply because they disagreed with her political philosophy, and/or disliked her personally? How do Hillary Clinton, her media allies and her legions of supporters account for the fact that many of those same deplorables voted for Barack Obama?

“Trump ran and won as, among other things, a white racial demagogue who mocked and insulted minorities on his way to the White House; while the left, as it has grown more diverse, has become accustomed to periodic spasms of hostility and mutual recrimination among its various minority groups and their white allies,” asserts columnist Paul MacDougald.

Really? A majority of Trump voters embrace racial demagoguery? And the Left’s understanding of diversity consists of sub-tribes jockeying for primacy, largely based on which one can elicit the most guilt from all the others?

Such clichéd cynicism, and the unending torrent of political correctness needed to sustain it, was as much a driver of Trump’s victory as anything else. And adding to leftist despair is the reality that Trump’s coarseness — seen as the antidote to political correctness — was not a bug but a feature of his success.

The real divide in America? The Right believes the Left is wrong. The Left believes the Right is evil.

Thus, leftists believe it is their sacred duty to impose their beliefs on the nation whether it wants them or not. And because of that sacredness, executive orders, court decisions, bureaucratic fiats and everything else that can be used to thwart the constitutional order is perfectly acceptable — when leftists do it.

Thus, a Supreme Court that usurps states’ rights and changes the 5,000-year-old definition of marriage is to be applauded. The same Court upholding an individual’s right to keep and bear arms? A travesty of justice. Barack Obama implementing DACA by executive order? Enlightened. Donald Trump demanding Congress decide the issue? Anti-immigrant bigotry.

Nor is the divide simply about differing worldviews. Many progressives themselves once had traditional beliefs regarding subjects like marriage and gender. But since they’ve “evolved,” every American must follow suit — within a progressive-defined timeline. Those who don’t? As contemptible as those who resist completely.

Imposing arbitrary timelines on societal change, no matter how worthy, virtually guarantees a tribalist response. Nonetheless, the Left remains obsessed with pushing the envelope. “Is Your Script Gender-Balanced? Try This Test” states a New York Times headline. It speaks to Hollywood screenwriter Christina Hodson’s development of gender analysis software that keeps track of how many characters are male and female, how many lines are spoken by each character, and eventually, “other issues of representation, like race and ethnicity,” as the Times puts it. “It’s a tool for people to self-police and look at unconscious bias in their own work,” Hodson insists.

More like a tool to make story-telling indistinguishable from progressive virtue-signaling.

If such tribalist-inspired nonsense were limited to Hollywood scriptwriting, it would be amusing. Yet as columnist Heather MacDonald reveals, the identity politics imposed on social science and humanities courses at America’s colleges is bleeding over into the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), now seen as insufficiently “diverse.”

How does one engender sufficient levels of diversity? By eliminating meritocracy. “Medical school administrators urge admissions committees to overlook the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores of black and Hispanic student applicants and employ ‘holistic review’ in order to engineer a diverse class,” MacDonald explains.

Will Americans countenance a nation where ideological imperatives for a movie script become indistinguishable from those for an operating room?

“When civil rights shifted from punishing mandatory segregation to punishing the lack of integration, it ceased to be a movement pursuing freedom and instead became a totalitarian movement,” asserts columnist Daniel Greenfield.

That totalitarian movement has pushed millions of well-meaning Americans into tribalist enclaves, where safety becomes more important than freedom of expression. And that retreat is often justified by what many Americans perceive is a double-standard with regard to accountability. Did the Trump campaign collude with the Russians, or is a Ruling Class long used to getting its way seeking to nullify the 2016 election? Are we an exceptional nation built on an unprecedented understanding of human rights and the limits of government power, or one built on the “genocide of native people and slavery,” where the “cradle of democracy is "bulls—t,” as filmmaker Spike Lee asserts? In America today, one’s answers to such questions are more often than not determined by one’s tribal allegiance.

As Sullivan reminds us, tribalism is not necessarily a bad thing. There is nothing wrong with “unconditional pride, in our neighborhood and community; in our ethnic and social identities and their rituals; among our fellow enthusiasts,” he writes. By contrast, he warns, when it calcifies and “rivals our attachment to the nation as a whole” and “turns rival tribes into enemies” it ultimately destabilizes the nation.

Of course, Sullivan blames both sides for the divisiveness but holds the Right more accountable — or so he thinks. “One of the great attractions of tribalism is that you don’t actually have to think very much,” he asserts.

The American Right can be blamed for a great many things with regard to tribalism. But dumbing-down public schools and colleges that routinely turn out legions of weak-thinking but well-indoctrinated social justice warriors isn’t one of them.

Is there a truce to be had? Oddly enough, the most recent Supreme Court decision striking down a federal law prohibiting sports betting epitomizes the “live and let live” federalism the Founding Fathers were prescient enough to make an integral part of governing documents. Yet federalism is only part of the equation. “Nurturing your difference or dissent from your own group is difficult; appreciating the individuality of those in other tribes is even harder,” Sullivan explains.

Individual thinking would undoubtedly be fatal for tribalism. But if the Left’s reaction to Kanye West is any indication, tribalism in America will last as long as leftists view a heckler’s veto as a reasonable substitute for debate.

It’s not. Not by a long shot.

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Wasserman Schultz Calls Five Million Americans 'Terrorists'

"The NRA is kind of just shy of a terrorist organization," declared Debbie Wasserman Schultz. "They have done everything they can to perpetuate the culture of violence that we have in our country with the spread of assault weapons across the nation." She was responding to Oliver North, the NRA's new president, who said recently of gun-controllers, "They call them activists. That's what they're calling themselves. They're not activists — this is civil terrorism." He accused them of "intimidation and harassment and lawbreaking."

North has a point, especially in light of the recent hate-filled boycott campaign against the NRA and the ignorant political pawns marching against our constitutional rights.

But we want to rebut Wasserman Schultz's gross slander more specifically. The nearly 150-year-old NRA is made up of roughly five million Americans who love our Constitution and stand in particular for the Second Amendment — the right that secures all the others. Those Americans commit crimes at a far lower rate than the general population. In fact, as a subset, concealed-carry permit holders are more law-abiding than the police. No NRA member has ever perpetrated a mass murder, though an NRA instructor did stop the one in Texas last year. When the annual NRA convention comes to any city, that city's crime rate drops. The NRA spends millions instructing Americans of all ages how to responsibly handle firearms, both for recreational purpose and self-defense. That reduces crime.

By contrast, most crime in America — and particularly gun crime — is committed on urban poverty plantations that Democrats have run for decades. That crime is not committed with what Democrats have misnamed "assault weapons," either, but by illegally owned handguns often wielded by drug dealers and gangs. Democrats perpetuate the culture of death through their rabid support of abortion. When political violence is committed, it's usually against Republicans. And as for actual terrorists, well, Democrat Barack Obama funded it with billions of dollars.

"It's kind of like a spoiled child stamping their feet on the ground, insisting that something right in front of their face isn't true," Wasserman Schultz said. Yes. Yes it is. But it's worse than that. Her hateful slander of law-abiding Americans is utterly contemptible.

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