Appeasing an aggressor invites only more aggression

From the playground to geopolitics, appeasing an aggressor invites only more aggression. This timeless truth of human nature is one that we moderns can’t seem to accept. We reflexively assume that a rational accommodation or concessions will be reciprocated by those proven to be ready to use any means necessary to achieve their aims, no matter how amoral, unfair, or vicious. Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court illustrate that this false assumption leads only to more demands, and ultimately to defeat.

The last-minute accusations from Christine Blasey Ford, a woman who claims that decades ago Kavanaugh groped her at a high school party, and Deborah Ramirez, who accused Kavanaugh of exposing himself to her at a frat party at Yale, are transparent acts of aggression against the judge and Republicans, one engineered by the Democrats.

Senator Dianne Feinstein sat for months on Ford’s letter and then––just as the Dems did in 1991with Anita Hill’s charges of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas’s during his hearings––released it only when Kavanaugh appeared to be heading for confirmation. Feinstein still hasn’t given the Judiciary Committee an unredacted copy of the letter. A few weeks after Ford went public, and after Kavanaugh said he had dairies from that summer detailing his whereabouts, The New Yorker published Ramirez’s account of a drunken party filled with obscene drinking games where he exposed himself to Ramirez.

Given that the Democrats had made public in advance their intention to derail the hearings and confirmation by any means possible, the timing of both sexual assault charges reeks of premeditated contrivance intended to delay confirmation as long as possible. But in the face of this naked ploy to bork Kavanaugh and derail the confirmation process for partisan advantage, the Republicans seem to be reverting to their customary preemptive cringe. All the Dems have to do is squeal “sexism” and Republicans start negotiating and offering concessions. Of course, after each concession comes another demand.

First the Dems demanded that Ford, a long-time Democrat activist, “be heard.” So last week the Chairman of Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, granted another deadline extension for Ford to decide whether to testify before the Committee on Monday. Senator Dianne Feinstein calls these concessions “bullying deadlines.” As Feinstein put it, “Show some heart. Wait until Dr. Ford feels that she can come before the committee.” Ford doesn’t “feel” like she can testify on Monday because she’s afraid of flying, despite offers from the Committee to travel to her in California. Then she feared for her life because of death threats ––threats also made to Kavanaugh, his wife and two young daughters–– so she now demands enhanced security measures. The Committee caved and moved the date to Thursday.

So of course, Grassley having been intimidated into giving Ford a chance to address the Committee, Ramirez and her handlers are now demanding the same privilege. “Creepy Lawyer” for porn star Stormy Daniels claims to represent a woman who also should be allowed to testify to the Senate Committee about Kavanaugh’s partying habits while at Yale. We’ll have to see whether Grassley can find the stomach to put an end to the farce of allowing unsubstantiated charges from Democrat activists to waste the Committee’s time.

Ford and Dianne Feinstein also keep demanding an FBI investigation, even though no federal crime is being alleged, and any investigation 36 years after the offense is impossible. Ford can’t remember where and when the alleged assault took place, nor how she got to or went home from the party where it allegedly occurred. Her own details of the event don’t jibe (Four boys or three? One girl or two?). She told no one about the assault until 30 years later. A “lifelong friend” whom Ford claims was at the party has denied any knowledge of the it, and says she’s never met Kavanaugh. Another friend who reported that the school was abuzz with gossip about the attack (which apparently took place during summer break), retracted her statement. The two men Ford named as possible witnesses to the assault have contradicter her claims under oath. And the accused Judge Kavanaugh also under oath vehemently denies the charges. Given that 36 years have passed since the incident, and the accuser’s memory is so hazy and short on coherent details, the FBI has nothing to investigate.

No law enforcement agency, let alone the FBI, would waste its time with an allegation of a crime decades in the past, and so patently incoherent and lacking in evidence. The “FBI investigation” is another delaying tactic.

The point is to delay confirmation by slandering Kavanaugh and baiting the Republicans into appearing to abuse victims of sexual assault. Why? Facing his likely confirmation, the Dems, egged on by the mainstream media––especially The New Yorker, which published a story too badly sourced even for The New York Times–– are desperately attempting to obstruct and delay the process until after the midterm elections, when they hope they will retake the Senate and thus stop any more Constitutionalist judges from being confirmed to the Court for the rest of Trump’s term.

The Democrats have stooped so low with these smears because they know the stakes. The courts and especially the Supreme Court have been critical to the progressives’ program since Woodrow Wilson. The biggest obstacle to the progressive dream of government controlled and managed by a technocratic oligarchy has been the Constitution. Its divided and balanced powers were designed precisely to rein in overreaching ambition and concentrations of power. Hence the Constitutional order must be subverted by the Supreme Court and its unaccountable justices enjoying lifelong tenure.

But if Kavanaugh is confirmed, there will be five reliably Constitutionalist justices on the bench, who are unlikely to tolerate judicial usurpation of Congress’s law-making powers. That’s why this current nomination is a hill the Dems are willing to beclown themselves on.

Given how obviously partisan and hypocritical this ploy is––doesn’t Keith Ellison’s accuser deserve to be heard and believed too? ––why has Grassley so far allowed himself to be played by the Dems? Because Republicans fear the backlash from all those women voters who presumably agree with the fundamentalist feminists, and insist that every accusation of sexual assault, no matter how much it’s unsupported by corroborating evidence or even plausibility, must be believed. This contention itself is an expression of the radical feminist narrative of innate male feral sexuality that makes them sexual predators.

The irony is that today’s feminists have been willing to sacrifice the earlier narrative of female power and agency that had been stifled by traditional views of the sexes and their capabilities. Instead, now women are Victorian hothouse flowers too delicate to make their way through their lives without the paternal federal government protecting them with its coercive power. Women have exchanged one form of dependence, and one double standard for another.

The Dems are using Ford and Ramirez as part of the Democrats’ transparently dishonest delaying tactics because they know that most Republicans have accepted this duplicitous feminist narrative and fear challenging it. Especially after the recent spate of sexual assault charges––many of them true, some false, others contested–– politicians consider bucking the narrative to be as politically suicidal as proposing to reform Social Security and Medicare. It’s the new third rail of American politics, one that transcends party affiliation. Hence the widespread virtue-signaling on the part even of conservative writers who preface their comments about Ford and Ramirez with prologues full of truisms about how horrible sexual assault is, how its self-proclaimed victims “must be heard,” and how churlish and sexist it is to question the truth of any charge. Grown-ups know all that and don’t have to be reminded every time the subject arises.

The Dems know that most Republicans come to this conflict with the huge disadvantage that results from accepting your opponent’s dubious ideology and dishonest narrative. The progressive party can dare the Republicans to ignore the endless specious demands, stop the show-trial, and proceed to a vote on Kavanaugh, because they know the Republicans, fearful of the “optics,” will cave. They know that the eleven male Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee dread the #MeToo movement casting them as knuckle-dragging Neanderthal sexists who want to “silence” the accuser with their “cavalier treatment of a sexual assault survivor,” as one Ford lawyer has said. Republicans still don’t get that no amount of appeasement will stop the left from demonizing them anyway. Just ask Boy Scout Mitt Romney, who was savaged for his innocuous “binders full of women.”

And don’t forget, the old sorta, kinda moderate Democrats like Feinstein and Chuck Schumer, who now have joined the crowd of trendoid socialists armed with torches and pitch-forks, will go along because they’re frightened of their party’s increasingly rabid left-wing base.

What can we do to end these confirmation circuses? Just stop holding them. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the Senate’s power to give “advice and consent” to the president regarding his nominee must entail days of televised hearings replete with caterwauling protestors and grandstanding Senators who’ve already made-up their minds. Invite written questions from the Senate, then schedule one day for the nominee to respond. Don’t put it on television, but make public a written transcript. Remove the television cameras, and attention-craving, politically ambitious Senators will be gone like a cool breeze.

For now, Grassley needs to end this farce.  No more concessions. No more delays. No more ceding control of the process to Democrat Party lawyers.  Make Senators go on the record with their votes, and hold them to account in November. Put to the test the Dems’ claims that a critical mass of women, many of them with sons they don’t want falsely accused, believes the fundamentalist feminist narrative and will vote accordingly. To borrow Churchill’s definition of appeasement, stop feeding the alligator in the hopes that you will be eaten last.

For fifty years the Democrats have proven they will demonize conservatives as racist and sexist no matter how often they bow and scrape. How about acting on principle for a change and shoot the alligator

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David Horowowiz hits back at the fake news media

When Donald Trump refers to the anti-Trump media – CNN, MSNBC and network television - as “fake news,” his description is not only accurate but welcome: finally, a conservative is fighting back against a press whose venomous corruption is a grave threat to American pluralism and its democratic order. But when the same “news” outlets falsely characterize political opponents, including the president, as racists and “hatemongers” to render them illegitimate, our democracy is in grave peril. In sum, the term “fake news” greatly understates the nature of the threat, and, along with it, the crisis we are facing as a nation.

As a prominent antagonist of the left, I have been a target of its malice for decades – in fact, from the moment I departed its ranks in the 1980s, and vowed to speak to my former comrades in the same language they spoke to others. Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? Since then I have been one among numerous conservatives victimized by their malevolent disregard for the truth, for anyone they disagree with, for common decency, and for the country that gave them their freedoms.

Today things are much worse than ever before. The left’s lack of respect for democratic principles, for political “others,” their readiness to employ gutter tactics and mangle the truth, has spread from Communist fringe publications of the Sixties, like The Nation, and the Daily Worker, to the Huffington Post, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

[Editor's note: On the left is typical leftist libel of David Horowitz. Aside from the smear of racism, the HuffPost is crudely mistaken about another matter: DeSantis wasn't paid for any of his speeches.]

Two weeks ago despite a 50-year public career as a civil rights advocate, and despite being the author of three published books on race – all of them championing Martin Luther King’s vision of equality - I was attacked as a racist by, among others, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, Esquire, New York Magazine, Politico, Newsweek, and a host of Florida newspapers, including the Orlando Sentinel, the Tampa Bay Post, and the Sunshine State News. In blaring headlines, I was called “an infamous racist,” “a hatemonger,” “a white supremacist” and a “race war theorist.” And I wasn’t even the primary target of the attacks.

That honor belonged to Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis, and legless war hero congressman Brian Mast, both of whom had the misfortune to attend my Restoration Weekend, which the Post designated “a racially charged event” and the others portrayed as a platform for racists. As it happens not only do I not invite racists to my events, for twenty years I have featured prominent African Americans as keynote speakers. In addition to Turning Point activist Candace Owens, I have recently given awards both to Larry Elder and liberal black Democrat, Adrian Fenty, former mayor of Washington DC. Fenty’s award was for the work he had done to provide scholarships for inner city children so they could get into schools that would teach them. Other keynote speakers at my Weekend have included former congressman J.C. Watts, former presidential candidate Herman Cain, Wall Street Journal editor, Jason Riley, Fox Business Channel anchor Charles Payne, former congressmen Allen West, Breitbart columnist Sonnie Johnson, Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson,

Must I also mention that I have six grandchildren, whom I love dearly, of whom only one is white? Or that on the weekend following these attacks I was at an intimate gathering to celebrate two birthdays with my family, half of whom were black?

All the attempts to portray me as a racist arose out of a deceitful article in the Washington Post, which bore the headline GOP Candidate for Florida Governor Spoke at Racially Charged Events. The transparently sleazy intention of the article was to associate Congressman DeSantis with an allegedly racist event, to show that he is a racist himself. Both claims are bald-faced lies. If we were not both public figures, the Post would be facing major libel suits right now.

I have to confess that when I first read the article I missed all the dog whistles to left-wing race baiters which the reporter, Beth Reinhard, had planted in her text. Consequently, I was taken aback when the article instantaneously triggered the rash of character assassinating headlines in the publications I mentioned, targeting DeSantis, Mast and me. I just grossly underestimated the malevolence of “liberals” in the era of anti-Trump resistance. The whole episode put me in mind of the Nazi paper, Der Sturmer, which specialized in exactly this kind of attack in the 1930s.

Of all the dog whistles marshalled by Reinhard, my favorite was her comment that one of my speakers, Milo Yianopoulos made a joke about “black-male genitals.” The obvious implication: Members of Horowitz’s event are racist throwbacks to the era of Strom Thurmond and Bull Connor. In fact, this remark was actually a quite amusing self-referent joke about Milo’s attraction to his newly-wed husband, who happens to be black. But if Reinhard had published that fact, she would have blown her whole smear.

Despite my appeals to Reinhard and her editor, Eric Rich, no corrections were offered, or opportunities to correct a damaging, reputation-shredding, election-tilting, misrepresentation of myself and my two distinguished guests. I specifically asked for an op-ed column to respond, or an objective Post profile of my events, but Rich seemed perfectly comfortable with the display of guilt by innuendo in the article and the outrageous attacks that followed. He was obviously comfortable with its consequences, which were clearly intended, and might well be severe. Being falsely tarred as racists could presumably cost two stellar individuals their quests for seats in the election. It’s also left me wondering, what elected official would want to risk such damaging attacks by attending my events in the future.

One factor in these gutter campaigns that I haven’t mentioned is the laziness and unprofessionalism of the reporters (and editors) involved. Not one reporter participating in these character assassinations for the Post, Huffpo, Politico, Newsweek, and the other magazines called me to check any of the specific allegations of racism made in their articles. I was interviewed by Reinhard, but she failed to mention the black genitals comment or any of the other dog whistle claims to get my views on them, including the preposterous but damaging accusation that my events were “racially charged.”

“Racially charged” would of course be an apt description of the hand-holding sessions that Barack Obama, the congressional black caucus and the Democratic Party leadership have conducted with America’s most notorious, most rabid anti-Semite, and anti-white racist, Louis Farrakhan. But of course, Farrakhan’s courtiers have prominent roles in the Post’s party of choice and are not going to be held to account by Beth Reinhard, Eric Rich or the rest of the “liberal” media, let alone tarred and feathered like Ron DeSantis, Brian Mast and me.

In fact, all the malicious and baseless claims -- that I am “hate-monger,” a “white supremacist,” an “infamous racist,” an “anti-Muslim fanatic” -- come from a single source: the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center. This is an organization so reckless in its accusations that it recently paid a devout and moderate Muslim $3.4 million for having labeled him “an anti-Muslim extremist.” The payout to Maajid Nawaz was volunteered because England has much stricter libel laws than the United States where it is virtually impossible for public figures like DeSantis, Mast and myself to get redress for the violence that has been done to our reputations and work.

Speaking of laziness and casually malicious reporters, it was to be expected that to check such serious charges, Beth Reinhard would research my Twitter feed instead of the three books I have written about race – or the many YouTube speeches I have given on the subject. As it happens, the selection of one of those tweets, illuminates why these racial attacks on myself and my guests are also attacks on this nation.

The tweet Reinhard selected was this statement: “Black Africans enslaved black Africans. America freed them sacrificing 350k mainly white Union lives. American blacks are richer, more privileged, freer than blacks anywhere in the world, including all black run countries.”

Of course, even though every claim in this statement is true, Reinhard and her progressive audiences see such statements as prima facie evidence of my “racism.” In their narrative, whites enslaved blacks. To imply or say, as I have, that black Americans should be grateful to Thomas Jefferson and white Americans for freeing them is to add insult to injury, and to be insensitive to their suffering. It also undermines the truly racist narrative of the left that white people are oppressors and evil.

But of course, I didn’t say anything like that. I have never encouraged blacks or anyone else to be grateful to their oppressors. The real issue here is the foundational gift that America made in its very creation to all oppressed minorities, and to black slaves in particular. This is something that the current identity politics of the Democratic Party and the left generally ignores or denies. But if Americans can’t agree on this historic achievement, we no longer have a common bond as citizens of the same nation.

I specifically posted my tweet as an antidote to the anti-American, anti-white racism that is rampant on the left, in our schools, in the Democratic Party, and in its kept media, like the Washington Post. The widespread attitude in these quarters holds that American patriotism is “white nationalism.” This claim is a dagger aimed at America’s heart.

Slavery existed in Africa for a thousand years before a white person ever set foot there. European slavers did not go into the African bush and throw nets over blacks to enslave them. They went to slave auctions in Ghana and Benin, and bought already enslaved blacks from black African slavers. Slavery had existed for 3,000 years and no one had called it immoral, until white male Christians in England and America did so. Thomas Jefferson wrote into America’s birth certificate the revolutionary proposition that all mankind was equal and each individual was endowed with a God-given and therefore unalienable right to liberty.

This commitment launched the emancipation of black slaves in the northern states and ultimately throughout the western hemisphere. By contrast there is still black slavery in Africa today. To free the south’s slaves immediately would have precipitated a civil war, which the free states would have lost. But within little over one generation, the dedication of Americans to a nation conceived in liberty, led to the abolition of slavery at the cost of 350,000 mainly (but not exclusively) white lives. That is something every American white and black should be proud of. That is an achievement that unifies our nation. We participated in an evil system that we inherited from the British, yes. But as a nation we dedicated ourselves to liberty and equality and ended slavery..

The political left doesn’t want Americans to be proud of their country. They don’t want blacks to recognize they had benefactors who were white Christian males. So they lie about our history, and attack us as white supremacists. It is a sad comment on the state of our country that merely stating the facts of our heritage should be considered anti-black and racist, particularly by institutions like the Washington Post.

When one side insists on denying our history, attacking patriots as “white nationalists” and smearing political opponents as “white supremacists” we no longer have a common ground as a people. Instead we have become a nation divided by civil war.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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