The recent rise of nationalism among conservatives

There is here a long article in "the Economist" which offers a passable summary of the history of conservatism and goes on to note that a new mood of nationalism has recently emerged among conservatives in both America and Europe.  And it sees that as a notable and alarming break from conservatism as it was. 

And in the USA, Hungary, Italy  and Poland the new nationalistic conservatism now rules.  Donald Trump of course is the most notable exemplar of the new movement.  With an approval rating among Republicans of around 90%, Trump IS the new conservatism.  Conservative parties are often rather fractured internally but American conservatives are solidly behind Mr Trump. The small remnant of "never Trumpers" are just talking to themselves

The piece however offers no clear explanation for this sudden departure from the "good ol' days" of the past. It treats the new movement as something of a mystery.  But it is no mystery.  You just have to be following world events to see that the new assertion of national pride has one very clear and obvious source -- the invasion of Western countries by large numbers of problem people from the Third World.

For the USA it was an accumulation of an ongoing problem with Hispanics and in Hungary and Poland they saw the influx of Muslim parasites into neighboring Germany and Italy and closed their borders in time to escape most of it. In all cases however, it involved a reassertion of the value of the national culture as better than what the invaders brought with them

Conservatives have always been proud of their country, its culture and their past but they are patient and tolerant people so have been little bothered by constant Leftist nibbling at their culture and demeaning the past achievements of their country.

But it got all too much when a flood of illegal new arrivals came in and were pandered to rather than expelled.  It would not have been so bad if the illegals had been expected to assimilate to the host country but the reverse was the case. The host nation was expected to make various adaptations to fit in with the illegals.  A process of undermining the American culture that had served Americans so well got underway. "Dial one for English" was just a token of what was resented.

The most important elements of culture are not its singing and dancing but the attitudes and customs embodied in its people.  And the very radical policies being promoted by the current rash of Democrat Presidential contenders makes it very clear that the attitudes and customs that made America great are far from secure.  It is now conceivable that America could degenerate into a socialist hellhole. And most Hispanics would vote for such a hellhole. They already do South of the border.

And conservative Americans do not at all like that prospect. Because conservatives tend to be interested in the past, they could see it clearly when the inherited culture was being diluted.  And the culture that the illegal arrivals brought with them was far from admirable. Everybody knows what a mess Mexico and most of Latin America is. Who would want to live amid the crime, corruption and poverty if they had some other option.  Mexicans themselves certainly don't want to.  That's why they come to the peaceful, orderly and prosperous USA.  So there is no reasonable way one can deny that the inherited culture of the USA is superior in its results from the cultures of Latin America.

With their crazy belief that all men are equal, Leftists erupt at any claim that one culture can be superior to another and by constant cries of racism and the like they have stood in the way of American cultural assertiveness.  They have suppressed talk  among Americans to the effect that America's traditional ways of doing things are better than what happens in places like Mexico.

But the Left could keep the lid on the pressure cooker for only so long and in America the lid blew off with the election of Trump -- someone who WAS prepared to call America great and defend its values. The shackles of political correctness were largely and joyously thrown off.

So what has happened is that conservative Americans have reasserted their traditional values over the moronic Leftist insistence that all cultures are equal.  American conservatives have always had pride in the unique phenomenon that is America and they now see that they need to speak up for reality.

And they want more than words. They want action to stop the deterioration of what they hold dear.  And a wall is the action that they most want, a wall to keep the bearers of problem cultures out -- JR

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A proven idea for reforming the crazy U.S. farm laws

Martin Hutchinson

British farmers are concerned about a “no-deal” Brexit, under which they would lose access to bounteous EU farm subsidies. U.S. farmers have had their subsidies increased by President Trump as a result of the China trade dispute. Agriculture subsidies burden national budgets and almost exclusively benefit large corporations and the very rich. There is a better model for supporting agriculture: the 1815-46 Corn Laws, reviled by Whig historians, but much cheaper and infinitely less corrupt.

Robert Banks Jenkinson, second Earl of Liverpool, had three objectives when introducing the Corn Laws in March 1815. One was to help Ireland to develop its corn agriculture, diversifying from potatoes – an objective partly achieved, mitigating the 1840s potato famine, but alas lost after the Corn Laws were repealed in 1846. The second was to ensure that Britain was close to food self-sufficiency in any future war – the Corn Laws would have been useful before the World Wars, in both of which Britain came close to starvation through German attacks on merchant shipping. The third objective, much pilloried by Whig historians, was to preserve the economic viability of British agriculture against “dumped” foreign competition.

The Corn Laws, for those who were not subjected to them in the British school system, were a system whereby (in the 1815 version) corn imports were prohibited when corn prices were below a base level of 80 shillings per quarter (28 pounds weight), then free above it. Each quarter’s (3 months) average corn price was used to set the allowability of imports for the following quarter; this granularity made the system transparent for importers and allowed them to plan shipments. Since Britain was almost but not quite self-sufficient in corn, this system allowed domestic producers protection against cheap dumped imports but tended to cap the price for consumers in years of dearth by opening the ports freely. In this classic version of the Corn Laws, no tariffs were imposed.

The one problem the Corn Laws did not solve occurred in their second year of operation; the “Year Without a Summer” in 1816, caused by the Mt. Tambora volcanic eruption the previous year, produced a corn dearth in early 1817 across the whole northern hemisphere, so no extra supplies were available when prices rose. However, other than that the system worked well. It was modified twice in the 1820s, after the deflation caused by Britain’s return to the Gold Standard made 60 shillings a more sensible equilibrium price than 80 shillings.

Agricultural protection today focuses primarily on the last of Liverpool’s objectives, preserving the economic viability of agriculture, which involves large capital investments and suffers badly financially when crops fail or a world market glut makes crops grown in rich countries (with high labor costs) uncompetitive. In Britain, there is a wish to avoid the dismal fate of agriculture in 1870-1939, when Corn Laws repeal and global free trade left British agriculture uncompetitive, de-capitalized the sector, ruined the traditional landed classes and impoverished the agricultural workforce. (David Lloyd George’s policies of land tax, before and after World War I, demonstrated an irrational class hostility to the landed gentry — not to the rich in general, with whom Lloyd George loved to hobnob – at that time, the landed gentry were engaged in a desperate, generally unsuccessful, attempt to stave off bankruptcy.)

In the United States, sentimentality about the “family farm” shows the same wish, though most U.S. farming is undertaken by agri-conglomerates. In Europe and Japan the cultural signals may be different but the result is the same: a wish to protect agriculture, which appears common to all rich countries. Oddly enough, poor countries, where labor-intensive agriculture is often more competitive, often subject it to increased burdens or outright harassment.

Take it as a given, then, that rich countries want to protect their agriculture. Their rationale for doing so is not all that different from Liverpool’s wish to protect the traditional agricultural interest, but their methods are very different, and much more expensive. The United States, for example, provides a wide range of subsidies to producers of various agricultural and similar products. These stretch so far as a subsidy to cotton, a commodity of which the U.S. is a major international exporter, causing huge economic damage to African cotton producers, which would otherwise be highly competitive because of their low labor costs. These subsidies have a huge direct budgetary cost.

The U.S. also regulates the use of agricultural products in ways which benefit producers but impose costs on consumers and the economy as a whole. For example, the U.S. requires a minimum percentage of ethanol in gasoline and uses various means to ensure that the ethanol so used is U.S. corn-based ethanol (environmentally very inefficient) rather than the much more environment-friendly sugar-based ethanol used in Brazil.

A further area of agricultural subsidy is the food stamps program. This is primarily a welfare program but is dealt with in the agricultural budget and at the margin provides additional support for U.S. agriculture. While highly subject to fraud, food stamps provide a function that would probably be provided somehow in any modern welfare-state economy.

A much more pernicious subsidy to agriculture is the temporary visa program, which allows U.S. agriculturalists to import workers and pay them far less than the normal U.S. wage rate. These programs impose crime and welfare costs on the society as a whole and subsidize the production of farm products that would not be viable at market wage rates. They thus impede mechanization in many crop areas where machinery could be used instead of cheap labor. If a particular crop cannot be produced in the United States using U.S. labor at market rates, then U.S. economic welfare will be increased by allowing foreign producers to produce it instead.

Both commodity-rich countries like the United States and commodity-poor countries like Britain, should replace the current subsidies to agriculture with a system of Corn Laws covering the major commodities produced by domestic producers. This would relieve the immense budget cost of current farm subsidies and greatly lower the even larger and more dangerous economic costs inherent in the current system. There would be no food stamps or special visas for low-cost labor; any poverty problems would be relieved by cash payments through the welfare system.

For Britain, Corn Laws would work much as they did in 1815-46. They would prevent imports of commodities when prices were low, thus keeping the domestic price close to the base price and ensuring a reasonable return for farmers. Farmers would adjust their crop production to reflect domestic needs, to avoid producing surpluses dumped on the international market at lower prices. Food prices would average somewhat higher than currently, although crop failures would result in imports (which would be more readily available than in 1815-46, in a world with Southern Hemisphere producers and fast transportation). The 1846 objection to the Corn Laws, that they raised food costs for the working classes, would be less salient now that only 13% of consumer expenditures are on food products; in any case the welfare system could be adjusted accordingly, much more cheaply than providing indirect handouts to the poor through agriculture subsidies.

For the United States, a no subsidy/Corn Laws system would, as in Britain, provide producers with an adequate and more stable income, but only to the extent they produced for domestic consumption. Producers of, for example soybeans with heavy international sales would be reliant on the vagaries of the international market, and accordingly might lose out compared with the current system. However, subsidizing production for export of items that can only be sold at below their production cost is economically suicidal and should be avoided however loud the squawking from the producer lobbies.

When base prices for Corn Laws were calculated, it might very well be that some agricultural products were viable only at impossibly high prices, having been heavily subsidized currently, both directly and indirectly through imports of cheap labor. Labor-intensive crops, in particular, are very often unsuited to high-wage economies except in specialty varieties, and hence should be imported rather than grown domestically. Wine is such a crop, for example. It makes no sense to produce cheap wine in France or California; those high-costs growing areas should be reserved only for high-quality, high-priced production, while the cheap wine is imported – even to France.

For Britain’s 19th Century economy, repeal of the Corn Laws and the move to unilateral free trade were a disaster; they destroyed the traditional agricultural basis of society and, in the long run, hollowed out the industry that had led the world in 1825. In an era when budgets all over the world are in huge deficit, agricultural subsidies make no sense today. As in many economic areas, Liverpool was far ahead of today’s thinkers; we should recognize this fact and return to his well-thought-out Corn Laws.

SOURCE 

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Newt Gingrich Eviscerates ‘profoundly vicious, cruel’ Liar Ocasio Cortez: Limbaugh, Crenshaw Agree



Socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has taken offense to being labeled a liar over her confirmed lies.

On Friday former House Speaker Newt Gingrich published a scathing op-ed excoriating her for lying about virtually everything.

“It took Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s visit to the border — and her dishonest comments afterward — to help me understand how profoundly vicious, cruel and dishonest she is,” he wrote.

“When you look at the larger picture, it is clear that Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is eager and determined to undermine and destroy America as we have known it. When your goals are that radical, lying is simply part of the game. When you despise American values and find the American people ‘deplorable’ and contemptible, lying is perfectly natural.”

The op-ed was published days after AOC and her freshmen peers stormed through several U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facilitates along the border like they owned the place and proceeded to propagate a hash of easily debunked lies about what they’d allegedly seen.

In response to Gingrich’s piece, MSNBC talking head Joe Scarborough suggested that the piece was an indictment of President Donald Trump, not the young congresswoman.

“While trying to attack ⁦@AOC⁩, Newt unwittingly writes a scathing indictment of Donald J. Trump,” he wrote in a tweet shortly after the publication of the former House speaker’s piece.

The tweet was disingenuous, given that unlike Ocasio-Cortez’s goals — which include abolishing U.S. Customs and Border Protection and basically dismantling American society — the president’s agenda is fairly moderate. Even the far-left blog HuffPost has admitted that Trump’s been “governing like a traditional Republican,” not some insane radical.

AOC picked up on and retweeted Scarborough’s tweet shortly thereafter. She made sure to include a sarcastic, disingenuous reply of her own.

“Ah yes, now Newt & the GOP are resorting to calling me a liar,” she wrote.”Who else do they call liars? – 96% of scientists who agree on climate change – Millions of Americans they locked up in the War on Drugs – #MeToo survivors.” “So I’ll take it as a compliment. Thanks.”

This was a clear-cut attempt to conflate wildly separate issues — and a poor attempt, at that.

Regarding scientists, nobody on the right has accused them of being liars. What they have done is push back on the claim by left-wing activists that 97 percent (not 96 percent) of scientists believe climate change is a man-made phenomenon.

Regarding the war on drugs, Republican President Donald Trump is responsible for signing into law the First Step Act, a bill “aimed at righting racial disparities in drug sentencing,” according to The New York Times.

And regarding #MeToo survivors, a plethora of alleged survivors have in fact been proven to be liars or hucksters, including Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford.

As for the president’s latest accuser, E. Jean Carroll, she destroyed her own credibility by making increasingly wild statements, including the claim that Americans think rape is sexy and the unapologetic admission that she used to sexually harass deceased former Fox News boss Roger Ailes.

What AOC has done is taken three separate issues completely out of context and used them to try and discredit the right’s accusation that she’s a liar. Much like every other lie she’s told, it seems so disingenuous.

-“96% of scientists” is a misleading statistics from a SMALL sample size

-Dem favorite Kamala Harris kept inmates locked up over petty drug crimes for cheap labor

And YOUR party made a joke out of sexual assault by using false accusations to take down people you disagree with

This, of course, is her whole shtick, as noted last week by conservative radio show host Rush Limbaugh.

“After a while, your gig gets old, your schtick no longer shocks, and so you have to keep crossing new lines,” he explained on his program this Wednesday. “And that’s all she’s doing. She’s addicted to getting noticed.”

“Now she runs down there and starts trashing and lying about conditions at the border,” Limbaugh continued. “And the people who administer the people who come into this country illegally. Flat-out lies that the detainees are being forced to drink out of toilets.”

As demonstrated by CBP Tucson Sector Chief Patrol Agent Roy Villareal in a video uploaded to Twitter on Thursday, detained illegal aliens are not being forced to drink water from toilets. Nor is there anything wrong with the sink water they have access to while in detention:

Limbaugh’s point about Ocasio-Cortez’s “gig” getting old was that she’s been lying from the very beginning. It’s a point that was echoed by former Navy SEAL Rep. Dan Crenshaw during a Fox News interview last Tuesday.

“She’s getting bolder with her lies. … Remember, first there was no crisis at all,” he said to host Martha MacCallum. “Then it was a manufactured crisis, then it was a crisis completely created by Trump, then there were concentration camps, then people are Nazis. Now she’s saying border patrol agents harassed her and forced migrants to drink out of toilets.” “This is insanity!” he added.

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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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What does Russia want?

I have just read a VERY long-winded article in the NYT which tries to answer the question above.  When people write at such length it generally means that they don't have any clear answers but hope that by covering a lot of ground the answer will be in there somewhere.  And such is certainly true of that article.

The answer has to be at the psychological level and some of the senior Russian officials the reporter interviewed did after a fashion tell the reporter what the answer was -- but she hardly seemed to notice it. 

What Russians generally and also their leadership  want is respect and acceptance that Russia is a great and important country. They are the world's largest country, stretching all the way across the Eurasian continent from the Baltic to the Pacific. And they have over the years made colossal contributions to the arts and sciences.   So when Russia lost control over half of the territory that they had controlled in Soviet times they saw that as a humiliation.

So the Russian leadership tries to restore a sense of pride in their own people and gain the international attention and influence it had in the Soviet era.  They do NOT see themselves as a failed state notable only for attempts at influencing  American Federal elections. 

It should not be forgotten that Russia had worldwide influence in the Soviet era.  It even had great influence and respect in the USA. The Democratic party at that time were shills for the Soviets.  The Donks did all they could to support Russia in any political controversy.  They were among Russia's best friends. 

Mr Putin would like some of that back. But instead he finds his country demonized -- criticized and marginalized on many fronts.  Recovering ethnically Russian territory in the Crimea seems a heroic and historic achievement to Russians but America has renewed the cold war on Russia over it.

Mr Putin has been very restrained over events happening in his own backyard (e.g. the independence struggle in Eastern Ukraine) so it is clear that countries further West have nothing to fear from him. He will however take opportunities that present themselves to get Russia noticed. A more cordial atmosphere between Russia and the USA would make such adventures less likely.  If America can remain friendly to the ghastly Saudis, friendship with Christian Russia should be no strain

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Introducing Daisy Cousens

I put up yesterday a video of the very glammed up Blonde in the Belly of the Beast -- a great anti-feminist lady.  There is a rather similar youtuber in Australia called Daisy Cousens.  She doesn't usually glam up as much but her approach is otherwise similar.  She appears on Australian media a fair bit but I imagine she is not well known in America.  She lives in my town -- Brisbane -- but, as I do, she follows events in America as well as Australian events.  I give two links below -- to her introductory page and to her latest commentary -- on the Antifa outrage in Portland.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw8rdbWx_3f0iIzL7OWYOcw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJt983sOMPM

I wrote more extensively about her last year, commenting on a video by her which was extremely "incorrect".

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Win for conservatives in Greece

Radical left-wing Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has conceded defeat after a partial vote count showed the conservative opposition had comfortably won a snap parliamentary election. 

The centre-right New Democracy party of Kyriakos Mitsotakis had 39.7 per cent of the vote compared to Mr Tsipras' Syriza party's 31.5 per cent after nearly 60 per cent of ballots were tallied. Turn out in today's snap election was around 57 per cent.

Mr Tsipras's Syriza party has held power in the country for nearly five years, making him Greece's longest- serving crisis premier and youngest in almost half a century at 44.

The result is a stinging blow to the outgoing Prime Minister, who had insisted he could overturn a sizeable gap in opinion polls running up to the election, which he asked to hold several months before his term expires in the fall.

'A painful cycle has closed,' prime minister-elect Mr Mitsotakis said in a televised address, adding that Greece would 'proudly raise its head again' on his watch. 'I will not fail to honour your hopes,' he added as early congratulation calls came from outgoing European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Mr Mitsotakis is from one of Greece's top political families. He is the son of former prime minister Constantine Mitsotakis, one of the country's longest-serving parliamentarians.

'The citizens have made their choice. We fully respect the popular vote,' Mr Tsipras said in his concession speech from central Athens, adding that he had called Mr Mitsotakis to congratulate him.

Official projections based on early partial results also showed the extreme right-wing Golden Dawn party teetering on the lower side of the 3 per cent threshold needed to be in parliament.

SOURCE 

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Neo-Marxism falls out of favour in Britain

Corbyn is a soulmate to Bernie

Labour have fallen so far in the polls that, despite being marginally ahead, they would still fall 100 seats short of a majority in a fractured new Parliament if a general election were called today.

The latest polling average has Jeremy Corbyn's party on 22.8 per cent, slightly higher than a new individual YouGov poll which had Labour on a historic low of 18 per cent.

Labour's 10-poll average is nearly a record low for the party, beaten only by the level seen in June 2009, when the party slumped to 21.8 per cent while dealing with the financial crisis and the fallout from the MPs' expenses scandal.

SOURCE 

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Trump Lifting Obama’s Nonsense Restrictions On Truck Drivers

You can be five minutes from home and you still have to stop driving for 10 hours under the current rules. Even a one minute violation would be costly. Going over time results in being declared “out of service” for at least a day and if truckers aren’t driving, they aren’t making money.

The Transportation Department under President Donald Trump is trying to ease ridiculous rules burdening those who drive for a living. Rigid rules don’t allow for problems on the road. That’s not dealing with reality. Between weather and other drivers, anything can go wrong.

“You don’t want even a one-minute violation,” warns Lucson Francois, explaining an incident that a truck stop break five minutes from his home caused. After maxing out the day’s allotted number of duty hours and unable to leave the truck unattended, he was forced to sleep in the berth behind the cab, when he could have been in his own bed.

Highway safety advocates assume the drivers won’t exercise common sense, to not drive beyond their comfort zones. What’s not being taken into consideration is the need for flexibility.

The trucks involved in fatal crashes in 2017 is a 10% increase from the previous year according to a report from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. A small percentage, or 60 out of 4,657, were described as fatigued or asleep.

The NTSB has declared fatigue to be a “large problem” and is trying to emphasize it on their “most wanted” safety improvements.

The trucking industry has an advocate in President Trump who is successfully rolling back stifling regulations. The Trump administration trusts truckers to do the right thing more than the prior administration.

Mostly Republicans had pressed for relaxing the rules a little to allow for more flexibility.

The independent truckers bristle at a bureaucrat sitting behind a desk telling him what to do, especially when that person doesn’t see what happens on the road. The “desk jockey” can’t know what the trucker deals with. “How can you judge me and what I do by sitting in a cubicle in an office?” asks Terry Button.

The burly upstate New York hay farmer owns his truck and estimates he’s logged about 4 million miles. He said “he’s never caused an accident, although he’s been hit twice by passenger vehicles.”

Current regulations insist on 11 hours of drive time within a 14 hour time frame. Ten consecutive hours need to pass before the 14 hour clock starts again.

More than eight hours of drive time requires a 30 minute break before that eight hour mark. Time is recorded automatically by electronic devices. The Barack Obama administration set this up in December 2017, the Trump administration has yet to overturn it.

The electronic device cannot be altered, it’s wired to the truck’s engine and there’s a display on the dash.

The inflexibility comes in when your time is up and there’s no place to pull over. That clock ticks loudly when faced with delays including cargo taking a long time to be loaded or unloaded.

The mandatory break is equally a problem, forcing them to pull over in unsafe places when they don’t feel they need a break.

An alternate to this that’s been presented, is that truckers be allowed to stop the 14 hour clock for up to three consecutive hours. Drivers could rest or wait out heavy traffic during this time.

It’s common sense. Drive when you’re up to driving, rest when you’re tired. Critics don’t think the truckers will use common sense.

SOURCE 

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Kamala Harris is NOT an American black but IS descended from a slave-owner

Kamala Harris has some family roots that are a lot more tangled than anyone ever imagined.

Harris was recently attacked by an African-American on twitter, which only started controversy because Donald Trump, Jr. re-posted the message asking if it was true.

"Kamala Harris is *not* an American Black. She is half Indian and half Jamaican. I'm so sick of people robbing American Blacks (like myself) of our history. It's disgusting. Now using it for debate time at #DemDebate2? These are my people not her people. Freaking disgusting."

It started a whole firestorm around the question of whether she was “black enough.” Jamaicans are apparently not considered “black” by some African-Americans.

When that hit the airwaves, people immediately started googling and it wasn’t long before someone stumbled over a genealogy that her father had posted online.

One of her hot button issues is slavery “reparations.” The idea has been on the table for a while and there is some serious discussion in Congress about actually writing checks.

According to her father, Harris won’t have to look too hard to find out who to start sending money to.

“My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town)”

By studying his family history, he got well acquainted with the politics of the sugar industry. “I came then to understand its origin as a system of global production and commerce, based on slave labour, with Jamaica as a key component of that system from its very start.”

Born in Ireland, Hamilton Brown soon owned a Jamaican sugar plantation and is credited with founding “Brown’s Town.”

Brown was quoted as declaring that there was no way he or the other sugar planters would allow “the interference of the Home Government with their slaves in any shape.”

SOURCE 

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AOC just another lying Leftist. Hispanic Pastors Toured Same Facility As Ocasio Cortez And Came Out With Very Different Impression

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and the Democratic Party have been peddling some serious allegations about the detention facilities housing illegal aliens at the southern border.

Of course, they’re trying to paint the Trump administration or any administration that supports enforcing federal immigration laws as fascistic in nature. The overcrowding, the lack of basic supplies, no soap, no toothbrushes, etc. the outrage is deafening from the Left and their media allies. It’s very entertaining. Yes, it is—because these same clowns said that the border crisis and the horde of illegals swarming the border was a manufactured crisis peddled by the Trump White House. Nope. You’re wrong—as always.

Ocasio-Cortez recently threw a tantrum at Border Patrol agents, refusing a tour, but threw in the toilet water allegations that got the liberal media going. Allegedly, those detained were told to drink from toilets. That’s somewhat true in the sense that the sinks at these facilities are located on top of the toilets; they’re connected. Yet, AOC reportedly didn’t even go into the facility.

Sorry, I don’t believe it. These are the most partisan left-wingers on the Hill hell-bent on getting Trump. It’s an election year. And the fact that AOC wouldn’t say if she saw people drinking from the toilets is a red flag. We’re not Venezuela, folks or at least not yet. Hispanic pastors recently toured the border detention facilities and found that there were quite a bit of lies being pushed by the Left (via Fox News):

Rev. Samuel Rodriguez was “full of indignation” when he saw the reports and heard from politicians about the deplorable and inhumane conditions for illegal immigrants at an El Paso County, Texas migrant detention center. But what he saw at the same facility toured by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. with a group of pastors was “drastically different.”

The president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, the world’s largest Hispanic Christian organization, and senior pastor of New Seasons Christian Worship Center in Sacramento shared his firsthand experience touring a migrant detention center during a press briefing Monday.

“I read the reports, saw the news clips. I just wanted to see what was actually happening in order to better enable our efforts to find a fair and a just solution to our broken immigration system,” Rodriguez, who has advised President Trump and both Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush on immigration reform, noted. “To my surprise, I saw something drastically different from the stories I’ve been hearing in our national discourse. Even as a veteran of immigration advocacy in the U.S., I was shocked at the misinformation of the crisis at the border.”

“We found no soiled diapers, no deplorable conditions and no lack of basic necessities,” Rodriguez remarked, adding he specifically asked border agents if they staged the facility in response to the negative press. “They unequivocally denied it — we were witnessing the identical conditions the attorneys saw when they toured the facility days earlier.”

In fact, some told him the sources from whom the negative coverage originated “never toured the areas of the facility that we toured” and speculated they might have had political motivations.

Shocker, these clowns lied.

SOURCE 

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The boiling Leftist hatred never stops

The U.S. Women’s National Team won it’s second consecutive World Cup on Sunday. They defeated Netherlands 2-0 in France.

After the victory, some protesters found a Fox News camera so they could berate the most powerful man in the world.

News just went live from a bar in France after the #USWNT win and people started shouting "Fuck Trump" on air

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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Watch the Blonde in the Belly of the Beast rip AOC



Her name is Rebecca Hargraves and she describes herself as a conservative millennial dame living in the communist hellscape of Seattle.

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Holocaust survivor says Ocasio-Cortez should be 'removed' from Congress for spreading 'anti-Semitism, hatred and stupidity'

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should be removed from Congress for spreading “anti-Semitism, hatred and stupidity,” said a Holocaust survivor whose group invited her to tour Auschwitz.

Edward Mosberg, the 93-year-old president of The Depths, a group commemorating the Holocaust, slammed the New York Democrat over her controversial comparison of migrant detention facilities to “concentration camps,” prompting him to call for her removal.

“She should be removed from Congress. She’s spreading anti-Semitism, hatred and stupidity,” Mosberg said in an interview with The New York Post. “The people on the border aren’t forced to be there — they go there on their own will. If someone doesn’t know the difference, either they’re playing stupid or they just don’t care.”

SOURCE 

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AOC satirist Doxxed And Threatened, Family Shuts Down All Her Social Accounts



The family of a young girl who went viral for mocking Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shut down all of her social accounts Wednesday, after receiving death threats and harassing phone calls.

A tweet from the account purporting to belong to the little girl’s stepfather said she will not be doing any more content because the harassment and death threats “have gone too far” and threaten her and the family’s safety.

“Ava will not be doing any more MINI AOC content,” the tweet said. “The Left’s Harassment and death threats have gone too far for our family. We have been getting calls on our personal phone numbers. For our safety and our child’s safety, we deleted all Mini AOC accounts.”

The 8-year-old girl, known as “Mini AOC,” got attention for her impersonations of Ocasio-Cortez, such as a tweet in which she mocked the New York Democrat’s theatrics over the migrant crisis. “Every time I plan a visit to the park it’s closed!” she tweeted, along with several photos of her dressed up to look like Ocasio-Cortez when she visited a migrant detention center this week

She appeared on Fox Business in May to discuss her impersonations, saying her dad and her uncle encouraged her to start making videos because they thought she bore a striking resemblance to Ocasio-Cortez. She said she likes Ocasio-Cortez, but “not that much” and impersonated her saying “did you know that?” when prompted by the Fox News host.

Her Twitter, Instagram and YouTube accounts are shut down. Her Twitter handle was taken over by another user, who tweeted from the account saying they want to prevent a “leftist takeover” of the handle.

SOURCE 

The Leftist hate never stops

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How the Anti-Defamation League conspired to have a critic investigated for a fake hate crime

I think this is a rather remarkable story about the quite poisonous Jewish Left so I am reproducing it in full.  Despite the strong and extensive commandments to morality in the Torah -- see for instance Leviticus -- Jewish Leftists have as much morality as the rest of the Left:  Nil  -- JR

By Ilya Feoktistov

On the morning of February 25, 2019, two prominent leaders of the New England Jewish community walked into a Boston police station to report that I had committed an anti-Jewish hate crime against both of them by threatening them with bodily harm. Robert Trestan, the New England regional executive director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and Jeremy Burton, the executive director of Boston’s Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), told the police that I was motivated by anti-Jewish bias, and that they were in fear for their physical safety as a result.

But, when Boston Police Department (BPD) detectives spoke to my attorney, Jewish civil rights advocate Karen Hurvitz, they were surprised to learn that I myself am Jewish and that, like Trestan and Burton, I am the executive director of a Jewish 501(c)(3) non-profit, Americans for Peace and Tolerance (APT), which confronts anti-Jewish bias as part of its primary mission.

In these troubled times, law enforcement cannot take reports of violent threats against Jewish leaders lightly. The level of urgency was upped several notches in this case because Messrs. Trestan and Burton, as prominent civic leaders in New England, have close personal relationships with Boston’s chief of police and mayor, the Suffolk County district attorney, the local U.S. Attorney’s office, and the governor of Massachusetts, among others. Mr. Trestan is a civil rights attorney, had advised the Obama White House on countering violent extremism, was honored by the Boston Police Foundation, and currently sits on the governor’s Task Force on Hate Crimes. Galvanized by the threat of prominent Jewish leaders being targeted by a dangerous criminal, scarce police resources were immediately mobilized to investigate the alleged threats.

Once the BPD detectives learned that I was a Jewish community leader, they were, understandably, confused as to why two Jewish executive directors would call the cops on another one and falsely accuse him of an anti-Jewish hate crime. My attorney explained the likely motive: my recent article in The Federalist, in which I was highly critical of Trestan and Burton’s leadership. The article criticized Trestan and Burton for politicizing the Boston Jewish community’s vigil for the victims of the 2018 Pittsburg synagogue massacre by turning it into an anti-Trump resistance rally.

Worse, the article noted that they had invited a real anti-Semite – Hamas-linked Boston imam Yasir Fahmy, to promote his agenda at this vigil. The article came with video of Imam Fahmy preaching to Boston’s Muslims that the Jews of Israel are desecrating the Al Aqsa mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount – a widespread anti-Semitic slander that has led to murderous violence against Jews. Trestan’s ADL usually censures Arab and Muslim leaders who resort to this sort of antisemitic incitement over the Temple Mount, instead of inviting them to speak at a vigil for antisemitism’s victims.

The article also revealed that Imam Fahmy preaches to Boston’s Muslims the same religious fundamentalist views about homosexuality that Mr. Burton loudly denounces when they are preached by Jewish rabbis. Burton, who has written heartbreaking accounts of being driven close to suicide by the intolerance he faced growing up gay in the Orthodox Jewish community, appears to be relatively less anxious about the emotional health of gay Muslim youths at Imam Fahmy’s mosque. Instead of loudly denouncing Fahmy, a few weeks after the article came out, Burton came to Fahmy’s mosque to praise the hate preacher, calling him “my teacher, Shaykh Yasir.”

The detectives saw what was really going on. “Tell me if I’m getting this correctly,” one of them asked my attorney. “All of them are Jews, but Feoktistov is more on the Right, and Trestan and Burton are more on the Left when it comes to politics?”

I do not doubt that Messrs. Trestan and Burton were quite upset by the article and emails that I sent them about it. Most people do not enjoy criticism. Then again, most people do not try to get their critics arrested for it. According to the police incident report, Trestan and Burton complained that “they receive emails regularly from the suspect (Ilya Feoktistov) that are offensive/ harsh in nature in regards to their work.” The email that they claimed threatened them with bodily harm ended with this line:

“I am preparing a disaster for you and devising a plan against you. So turn from your evil ways, each one of you, and reform your ways and your actions.’”

To two non-Jewish Boston cops, this ‘disaster’ stuff, combined with Trestan and Burton’s misrepresentations to the police, might well sound like a potential threat. Instead, as the detectives learned, it was Jeremiah 18:11, a Bible passage included in the email under the apparently-mistaken assumption that Boston’s Jewish leaders know Jewish scripture. [LOL] In the passage, the prophet Jeremiah criticizes the failures of the Jewish leaders of his time, predicting disaster for the entire people if their rulers continued to ignore threats to Israel’s safety. Ironically, Burton and Trestan now seem to mimic those corrupt ancient Jewish leaders, who responded to Jeremiah’s warning by having him arrested, saying:

“Come, let us denounce him and pay no heed to any of his words.” (Jeremiah 18:18.)

It is possible that Trestan and Burton are simply illiterate when it comes to their religion’s holy texts and had failed to distinguish Jewish scripture from an anti-Jewish threat; that they were then genuinely panic-stricken by the email and were compelled to report the Bible lesson as a hate crime. But I doubt it. Jeremiah is so well-known for preaching disaster that his name is synonymous with the angry harangue against the powerful. The part of Jeremiah (18:1-12) containing the verse is one of the most-quoted allegories in the Hebrew Bible – the piece of clay in the potter’s hand – and is part of the traditional evening prayers on the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur. Burton, who identifies as an Orthodox Jew, is himself fond of quoting Jeremiah. Perhaps he and Trestan nevertheless didn’t get the reference. Or perhaps they knew what they were doing when they came up with their plot.

Thankfully, once the detectives figured out that I had gotten “jussied” – that Burton and Trestan had filed a fake hate crime report against me for political reasons – I was off the hook. Unfortunately, there is little chance that these well-connected grandees are now going be held accountable, like ordinary folks who file a false police report, by their own friends in law enforcement.

Trestan and Burton’s misappropriation of the criminal process as a personal tool to quash public criticism is Kafkaesque by American standards, but lame compared to what people like them can do when the state allows them to denounce their fellow citizens for crimes of speech and thought. In the Soviet Union, it was common knowledge then that there were people in that society who, for venal, malicious, or ideological reasons, would reach out to those with the legal authority to use violent force and secretly provide false denunciations against their foes or rivals. These people exist in every society. In the United States, however, the destructive influence of such people on the social and moral fabric is mitigated by due process, democratic norms, and, among those familiar with scripture, the commandment against bearing false witness.

Like their 20th Century comrades in my former homeland [Russia], contemporary leftists are not bound by such restraints. Censoring speech and opinion that they do not like, to the point of resorting to false denunciations, has often become standard practice for the progressive movement within the spheres where it is dominant. Even as they steadily lose legitimacy in the Jewish community due to the growth of anti-Semitism on the Left, progressive Jewish leaders like Trestan and Burton demand ever greater authority to dictate proper opinions to American Jews.

Recently, while defending Democrat Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib from charges of anti-Semitism, Burton insisted, emphatically and without irony, that the nation’s media and government must grant leftist Jewish leaders like him and Trestan, “leaders who represent the sensibility of our community,” the exclusive privilege “to determine what is, or is not, anti-Semitic.” Even without this privilege, leftist Jewish leaders like Trestan and Burton presume to appropriate anti-Semitism as an exclusive label for their political enemies; resulting in the absurdity of Burton telling Boston’s police that I am an anti-Semite, and telling Boston’s Jews that Rashida Tlaib is not.

Crying “anti-Semites!” at their political opponents as the proverbial wolves will, at some point, stop working for progressive Jewish leaders if they continue to devalue the term for their own political advantage to the point of meaninglessness. Ultimately, the real wolf shows up, and all of us – except perhaps Trestan and Burton – have read how the story ends.

SOURCE 

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Trump’s Stand Down Order on Iran – A Just Decision

President Trump provided an insight into his thought processes when he reversed an order to attack an Iranian military installation in retaliation for the downing of a U.S. reconnaissance drone. Apparently, we were “cocked and loaded,” our planes in the air, or about to be, when he asked for an assessment of the damage expected from the attack.

Being advised that as many as 150 deaths were likely, he rescinded the strike order. Those deaths, he felt, would not have been “proportionate” to the loss we suffered, and so not justified by what Iran had done.

Trump isn’t Catholic. In fact, his religious identity is rather unclear. But his use of the term, “proportionate” suggests that his thinking is at least somewhat informed by Catholic social teaching.

Perhaps among those advising him there’s someone who has a Catholic perspective. My hunch is that it may be Vice President Mike Pence, who while an Evangelical now, was raised in the Catholic Church.

Trump took criticism for this reversal, which was seen by some as a sign of indecisiveness on his part. Others applauded his restraint, observing that it strengthened his hand, clearing the way for us to strike even harder, should the Iranians commit another provocative act.

I take the latter view, though I suspect there was more to this last-minute change of direction. It’s possible that Trump was attempting to exploit division within the Iranian leadership, or maybe he had received some back-channel indications of a receptiveness to further negotiations.

Diplomacy is always complex and multi-layered.

Nevertheless, what we heard from the president was an echo of Catholic Just War Theory.

The Church teaches that for a war to be just it must meet certain qualifications. For instance, it must be declared by a competent authority (individual citizens or lower-level officials cannot make war on other nations or groups). Also, there must be a reasonable chance of winning (calling people to risk their lives in a cause that is likely impossible is not just).

There are other criteria as well. But perhaps the most important is that action taken must be proportionate to the action provoking it. And that is the point which the President seems to have grasped (or at least emphasized).

He saw that the destruction of human life would be greatly disproportionate to the destruction of a drone — sophisticated and expensive as that piece of equipment was. And in that he acted from a position of Christian principle.

These are precisely the kinds of concerns on which the Church is obliged to speak — and our elected leaders are bound to consider. In fact, I see in this incident an example of the proper relationship between moral teaching and civic responsibility.

Too often priests, bishops and theologians are tempted to make high-sounding pronouncements on specific questions of government policy. And just as often our officials ignore them — which seems to set public authority against Church authority.

But as sincere and fervent as these pastoral entreaties might be, the fact is churchmen have neither the competence nor the responsibility to make such judgments. Our role is to be moral teachers.

We should avoid the temptation to lecture public officials on how they ought to be meeting our expectations. Rather, we must constantly bring those who possess the relevant authority back to the eternal truths of right and wrong on which difficult decisions must be based in order to be morally valid.

That’s the church-state balance on which our country was originally founded.

We celebrate the Fourth of July this week. In our ideologically distorted age, don’t let anyone try to convince you of the trendy notion that America rests on secular, “Enlightenment” principles. Instead, be clear on the fact that the very idea of America is profoundly moral and profoundly religious.

As John Adams put it, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Deep in his heart, President Trump seems to understand this. God bless him for it. And God bless America.

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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The real reason why the left was against Donald Trump's July 4 speech

Gary Varvel

Now we know why the Democrats were so upset about President Trump speaking on the Fourth of July.

It was not because it was political or partisan. It was patriotic and that is what annoys the left the most.

Several days before the speech, we heard that Trump was hijacking Independence Day and turning it into a campaign rally. But Trump never mentioned the 2020 campaign in his speech.

We heard that Trump’s desire to have tanks on the National Mall was an out-and-out authoritarian performance art. But that wasn’t really the issue. Neither was the fake outrage over the cost.

There was no mention of political opponents and no mention of the fake news media. And this wasn’t Trump co-opting the nation’s birthday to celebrate himself. In fact, for a man who loves to talk about his accomplishments, he never mentioned himself.

No, Trump did something far more dangerous to the left. He gave America a strong dose of patriotism. He gave Americans a history lesson on the great people, heroes and their great accomplishments over the last 243 years.

Earlier in the week, The New York Times ran a video arguing America isn't the greatest nation on Earth, "the U.S. is really just O.K."

Without mentioning The Times or the video, Trump proceeded to tell us about America’s greatness for nearly an hour interrupted only by applause, flyovers and military songs. At one point, I thought “who is this guy and what have they done with President Trump?”

“Today, we come together as One Nation with this very special Salute To America,” said Trump. “We celebrate our history, our people and the heroes who proudly defend our flag — the brave men and women of the United States Military!”

And boy, did he. Starting with the story of America’s war for independence, Trump quoted the words and deeds of Americans that have long been forgotten but need to be remembered.

Trump told the story of Gen. George Washington as he readied his troops to fight the British invasion. Trump said, “Washington’s message to his troops laid bare the stakes, He wrote, ‘The fate of unborn millions will now depend under God on the courage and conduct of this army, we have therefore to resolve to conquer or die.’”

We are the millions who benefited from their sacrifice.

In reminding America of the great acts of past generation, Trump brought it to the present by honoring our first responders and all of the men and women of law enforcement. Trump also honored the Gold Star families who made the ultimate sacrifice.

Legends and icons

He introduced NASA legend Gene Kranz and told him, we’re going back to the moon and we’re going to plant our flag on Mars.

He also introduced and thanked civil rights icon, Clarence Henderson who was 18-years-old in 1960 when he took part in a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.

“Almost six decades later, he sits tonight in a seat of honor,” Trump said. “Clarence thanks for making this a much better place for all Americans.”

I found it very unifying but there were some triggers for the Left.

Trump said “This country the most exceptional nation in the history of the world and it’s at its strongest now.” American exceptionalism annoys the left.

“We are one people, chasing one dream and one magnificent destiny,” Trump said. “We all share the same heroes, the same home and the same heart and we are all made by the same almighty God.” Mentioning God annoys the left.

I think this should become a tradition for every president from now on. With all of the partisan political fights, it was nice to be reminded of American’s amazing heritage. It was inspiring and that’s what we need.

For one day, Trump put partisan politics aside and focused the eyes of America on our past, present and to our future.

Thanks, Mr. President.

SOURCE 

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Trump seizes the political momentum

Donald Trump’s takeover of Washington seemed all but complete yesterday as he stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial watching fighter jets fly over him with army tanks on the sidelines.

It was all symbolic, of course, but this was the Independence Day party Trump had wanted and ordered against the howls of his opponents. As the President grinned on stage, cloaking himself in patriotism ahead of the July 4 fireworks display, it was clear Trump had once again rewritten the rule book to suit his presidency.

As usual, he did so in the face of a long list of opponents, including Democrats, most of the US media and some former Pentagon officials who accused him of politicising a bipartisan patriotic celebration. But Trump didn’t care. Instead, he only increased his demands during the week, extending the fireworks show and ordering that Abrams tanks be brought up from Georgia to add more grunt to the occasion.

This came just days after Trump’s made-for-television moment with Kim Jong-un when the President met the North Korean leader in the demilitarised zone on the border of the two Koreas after inviting him via Twitter.

Kim responded to his tweeted invitation and Trump became the first sitting US president to step into North Korea. At every turn, Trump is living out his 2016 promise to voters that he would be an unconventional president, not to mention compelling, controversial and unique.

As Trump approaches 2½ years in the Oval Office, his dominance of the daily news cycle in the US has never been greater, denying much needed oxygen to the gaggle of Democrats competing to challenge him for the White House. After a successful G20 meeting in Japan, for which he received positive reviews, even from long-time critics such as The Washington Post editorial board, Trump now surveys a political landscape that is as favourable to him as at any time in his presidency.

As the advantages of incumbency and a purring economy, growing jobs and pay packets, low unemployment, no major wars and even recent border security problems play into his hands, Trump finds himself politically in a rare sweet spot.

It is a far cry from the dark days of early last year, at the height of the Mueller investigation, when Trump was reeling from the fallout from his sacking of FBI chief James Comey and his dysfunctional White House was being stripped bare by the lurid revelations in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury.

Even so, it is difficult for Republicans to claim with any confidence that Trump is now the favourite to win next year’s presidential election.

Trump’s approval rating — at 43.8 per cent according to the RealClearPolitics’ poll average — is near the highest of his term, but it is still far lower than any president would want at this stage of the re-election cycle. His disapproval rating is still above 50 per cent at 52.5.

However, Trump’s low poll ratings previously have been misleading. He trailed his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, all the way in the 2016 campaign, including on polling day, until he won.

Internal Republican polling also shows the President performing poorly in the three key swing states he stole in 2016 to win the election — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Trump won these three states by a combined 79,646 votes. If he loses these three states next year, he loses office.

The polling shows him trailing Joe Biden and other leading Democratic candidates by sizeable margins in these three key states, largely because of a drop in support from moderate voters, especially women, in the suburbs of regional towns and cities. These were moderate Democratic voters who switched to Trump in 2016 but have since been alienated by his style of leadership. It was this group that primarily drove the Democrats to win back the House of Representatives in last November’s midterm elections. They remain the most powerful obstacle to his re-election.

“My feeling is the election is real­ly a 50-50 prospect right now,” says Mike Green, senior vice-president for Asia at Washington’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies and a former member of the National Security Council under George W. Bush.

“I say that because something unprecedented will have to happen for him to either win or lose re-election. No president in the postwar era has lost re-election when the unemployment rate is as low as it is now.

“On the other hand, no president has won re-election with negative numbers as high as Trump’s, so one of those two records or precedents will have to be broken.”

But for now the momentum is with Trump, helped by the implosion among Democratic contenders after their first debate, in which two clear frontrunners, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, faltered.

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale says: “I think the President could beat anybody. The momentum behind this President right now is like nothing that history has ever seen.”

Of course Parscale would say that, but on the key issues that will have an impact on voters next year the trends right now are favouring the President.

This week marked the 121st straight month — or 10 straight years — in which the US economy expanded, the longest expansion on record. The US economy is growing at a healthy 3 per cent, although slower rates are forecast next year.

Unemployment is at a 49-year low of 3.6 per cent.

Trump has been in power for only a quarter of this time and has been lucky to inherit a good economic cycle, but voters tend to credit presidents for strong economies and punish them for bad ones.

The trickle-down effects of the economy also are benefiting African-Americans and Hispanics, two important groups that Trump is trying to woo after they largely voted against him in 2016. The growing problem of undocumented migrants at the Mexican border is also playing into Trump’s hands politically in a way that seemed unlikely six months ago.

Early this year, when Trump claimed there was a “crisis” at the southern border, he was criticised by Democrats because the numbers of detained migrants crossing into the US were still far fewer than a decade earlier.

They accused Trump of manufacturing a crisis to secure funding for his promised border wall. But since then a sharp spike in the number of unauthorised migrants entering the US, especially family groups with children, has changed the perception of many Americans. The number of migrants apprehended at the border surged in May to 132,887, including 11,507 unaccompanied children.

This was the highest monthly level since 2006 and the first time that detentions exceeded 100,000 since April 2007. The conditions at overcrowded border detention centres now are making daily headlines in the US.

A CNN poll this week found 74 per cent of Americans now say the situation on the border is a “crisis” compared with only 45 per cent who felt that way in January. This increase was steepest among Democratic voters, who previously had ridiculed Trump’s claims: 70 per cent of Democrats now call it a crisis compared with 23 per cent in January.

Trump has seized this as opportunity to intensify his attack on Democrats as weak on border security, an issue that resonated loudly with his base in 2016 and will likely do so again next year.

When Democratic presidential contenders in last week’s debate advocated decriminalising illegal border crossings and providing undocumented migrants access to healthcare, it must have seemed like a gift to Trump, who immediately jumped on to Twitter.

“All Democrats just raised their hands for giving millions of illegal aliens unlimited healthcare,” he tweeted. “How about taking care of American Citizens first! That’s the end of that race.”

Opponents also criticised Trump’s highly unorthodox threat to levy tariffs on Mexico unless it did more to help secure its borders with Central America. But it did have the intended effect of forcing Mexico to deploy thousands of extra troops to reduce the number of undocumented migrants entering Mexico from Central America en route to the US.

Each of these issues gives Trump the same ammunition he used in 2016 to secure his base and win the election.

Yet to the puzzlement of some, Trump has so far directed all of his campaign efforts into keeping, rather than expanding his base. His campaign launch rally in Orlando, Florida, this month was a re-run of his 2016 rallies as he mixed dark claims of persecution by the FBI, by Mueller and by the media with boasts about his achievements.

So far, Trump’s base has proved to be intensely loyal to him. About 90 per cent of Republicans approve of his performance. When asked by Time magazine last week whether he should reach out to swinging voters, Trump said: “I think my base is so strong, I’m not sure that I have to do that.”

Trump has come out of the Mueller inquiry without serious injury in the polls and Democrats in the house are divided on whether to try to impeach him. The President’s biggest selling point for next year’s campaign will be that he has ticked off a long list of those promises he made in 2016, from tax cuts, to job growth, the US withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris climate change accord and the Iran nuclear deal, the reworking of North American Free Trade Agreement, the challenges to China and NATO, and moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, among ­others.

Trump’s divisive and confrontational style remains his biggest weakness and it explains his persistently high disapproval ratings. Biden believes this is his ticket to the White House.

The former vice-president is campaigning almost entirely on being the anti-Trump, promising to restore more civility and decency to the office of the president.

The key question is whether Trump’s controversial style will ­attract more people to vote Democrat than they did in 2016. The argument against this theory is that Trump’s maverick style is hardly breaking news and he won the 2016 election when voters were ­already fully aware of who he was.

The biggest risk to Trump’s base right now, and perhaps his re-election, is whether he can strike a deal to end his trade war with China before US farmers turn against him in key swing states.

At the G20 meeting, Trump agreed with Chinese President Xi Jinping to reopen negotiations on a trade deal and to pause his threat to impose a further $US300 billion in tariffs on Beijing.

CSIS’s Green says Trump’s decision to resume talks with Xi was driven by political concerns about imposing more financial pain on American farmers.

“The tariffs on China, because of China’s retaliation with (tariffs on US) soybeans and agriculture, are really unpopular with the farmers, who are probably more important to Republicans than the blue-collar base,” he says.

Green says he has been meeting the heads of the US farm lobbies, who tell him their members hate the tariff war but they’re not blaming Trump yet.

“They still support Trump but what the leaders of these agricultural associations say is that by August and September when farms start foreclosing, the pain will be enough that they think farmers will start to turn on the President.

“So for me, it was very predictable at the G20 that he would just agree to keep talking to the Chinese because he can’t raise tariffs again without taking a major political hit yet he can’t lower tariffs right now without taking a hit.

“He has very little manoeuvring room on policy.”

Many observers, including Green, say Trump’s political strategy over the year ahead will focus not so much on growing his own base but on goading Democrats into adopting policies that are to the left of mainstream Americans.

Green says Trump is already seeking to push the Democrats to the left of the mainstream on ­issues such as immigration and healthcare.

“Trump can’t break his negative 50 per cent plus ratings but he can try to drive up the negative rating of the Democrats by baiting them to take on policies that are unpopular with the majority of Americans,” he says.

Trump would be encouraged by what he saw in the first debate between 20 of the 25 Democrat contenders. After sub-par performances from the two frontrunners, Biden and Sanders, they both have tumbled in the polls.

The debates also shone light on the extent to which most of the field, from poster-girl Kamala Harris to Elizabeth Warren, embrace policies on immigration, health and taxes that were too left-wing even for Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. There is a long way to go until polling day in November next year — a lifetime in the fast-moving Trump presidency — and much can still go wrong for him.

But as he approaches the 2½-year mark in the White House, the prospects of a second Trump term are improving.

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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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CNN see hate everywhere except where it is -- on the Left

They see an "explosion of white supremacy" but anything non-Leftist rates as white supremacy to them. By any sane definition, the number of white supremacists is tiny. Muslim supremacy and Leftist supremacy are the big problems.  If you want to witness  an explosion of hate, just say the name "Trump" to almost any Leftist


CNN marked the beginning of the Fourth of July holiday week with a one-hour special called "State of Hate: The Explosion of White Supremacy." These people pledge allegiance to "Facts First" in their marketing, but on what factual basis is there an "explosion of white supremacy" in America?

CNN will deny it, of course, but at the end of the day, it doesn't see much difference between white supremacists and Trump Nation. CNN spent an hour promoting fringe racist figures like Richard Spencer and David Duke, who promised he was going to "fulfill the promises of Donald Trump." But this was outdated, since Spencer tweeted last November, "The Trump moment is over, and it's time for us to move on."

In the CNN special, racists were interspersed with footage of people saying "Make America Great Again" and footage of people protesting illegal immigration, with an obvious smear implied. Oppose illegal immigration? You must be a Klansman. Or a neo-Nazi.

This "explosion of white supremacy" is apparently so dangerous that CNN felt the need to expose it during an hour of prime-time programming.

The left-leaning Anti-Defamation League reported a KKK decline in 2016, but it wasn't specific about an overall number. It said: "Despite a persistent ability to attract media attention, organized Ku Klux Klan groups are actually continuing a long-term trend of decline. They remain a collection of mostly small, disjointed groups that continually change in name and leadership. Down slightly from a year ago, there are currently just over thirty active Klan groups in the United States, most of them very small."

Has it gone up since then? A 2018 ADL report on the Loyal White Knights group within the Ku Klux Klan said the group "is the largest and the most active Klan group in the country with approximately 100 members." You read that correctly. The Knights' rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina, in July 2017, with "fifty-odd Klansmen" qualified as "the largest rally organized by a Klan group in recent years."

To CNN, this is somehow the evidence that demands an hour on white supremacy.

Giving oxygen to the Klan comes naturally to CNN. Black comedian W. Kamau Bell began his CNN documentary series, "United Shades of America," in 2016 with a stunt where he hung out with the KKK, as if the group was deeply important. The Washington Post saluted Bell for peppering "his wry observations with a big, booming laugh" and his ability to "stay cool" around the KKK kooks.

The same leftists who spent decades lamenting the Red Scare paranoia — as if conservatives were saying there was a communist under every bed — promote a Brown Shirt Scare about impending American fascism. This, in turn, fuels a radical "anti-fascist" (or "antifa") movement that threatens violence in the streets over the cuckoo conspiracy theory of a Nazi takeover of America.

What about antifa? CNN didn't include the movement in its "State of Hate" special. "Hate" is only something the right-wingers do. They might agree with their friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center about the "myth of the unhinged, violent left." Sadly, the day before CNN's special, thugs in Portland, Oregon, assaulted several people at an antifa protest including Quillette journalist Andy Ngo, who routinely films antifa rallies.

If the media really wanted to describe dangerous and violent "hate" groups fairly, they would find them on the left with antifa. Conservatives want nothing to do with the KKK. Downplaying antifa — or even promoting it, as CNN has — is the very opposite of putting the facts first.

SOURCE 

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Trump Signs Law Making It Harder for IRS to Seize Money From Americans

The Internal Revenue Service seized $446,000 from the bank accounts of brothers Jeffrey, Richard, and Mitch Hirsch in 2012, claiming a “structuring” violation against the owners of Bi-County Distributors Inc. for making multiple bank deposits of less than $10,000.

The government never charged them with a crime, nor gave them a hearing to enable them to contest the seizure, but after intense national media attention to the case, the government returned the funds.

The case was among many that highlighted an abuse by IRS agents known as legal source structuring that allowed the tax collection agency to use a law, the Bank Secrecy Act, intended to combat money laundering, to seize assets.

President Donald Trump signed a bipartisan bill Monday to force greater accountability on the IRS in the property seizures, as well as protect taxpayers from identity theft, boost whistleblower protections, and modernize the tax agency.

“We just finished signing, the important signing, of the Taxpayer First bill, the IRS Taxpayer First, which is a tremendous thing for our citizens having to deal with the IRS,” Trump told reporters after the signing. “It streamlines and so many other changes are made. That was just done and signed. It’s been made into law. So we are all set on that.”   

The new law, the Taxpayer First Act, requires the IRS to show probable cause that the smaller transactions were made in order to evade financial reporting requirements.

Legal source structuring laws kick in when large financial transactions are broken up into smaller transactions, which sparks suspicion from the IRS. If dividing up transactions is done with the intent to evade bank reporting requirements, it’s illegal, and the IRS can seize assets.

A 2017 audit by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found no evidence of underlying crimes in 91% of the structuring cases examined in a sampling.

The inspector general’s report further noted that the IRS frequently ignored reasonable explanations business owners have for deposits.

The IRS used the power in 2,500 cases between 2005 and 2012, gobbling up $242 million in assets, according to the Institute for Justice, a public interest legal group. Of those, one-third involved only allegations of structuring, and not other alleged wrongdoing, the institute found.

The provision of the Taxpayer First Act largely codifies rules the IRS had already made in response to public pressure, but unlike laws, regulations can be overturned administratively.

The new law further requires a hearing within 30 days of an assets seizure.  It also establishes an independent office of appeals within the IRS for taxpayers.

“This is a long time coming,” said Jason Snead, senior policy analyst at the Institute for Constitutional Government at The Heritage Foundation. “There have been many noted abuses in cases not derived from illegal behavior. I hope this is the beginning of a longer process to reform the civil forfeiture laws.”

At a time when Congress has had a tough time agreeing to any major legislation, the Republican-controlled Senate and Democrat-controlled House voted overwhelmingly in favor of the legislation. 

“This bipartisan, bicameral bill represents years of hard work and consensus building,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a statement after its Senate passage. “It’s a big first step toward strengthening taxpayer protections and turning the IRS into the customer service organization it ought to be.”

The new law authorized the IRS internal investigators to communicate with whistleblowers who are, during the processing of their claims, reporting bad behavior within the agency if doing so would be helpful to the investigation. The internal investigators, usually the inspector general, would also notify the whistleblowers on the status of the investigation, under the new law.

The law further extends anti-retaliation provisions to the IRS whistleblowers currently afforded to whistleblowers in other agencies.

SOURCE 

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Walter Williams: Assault on Western Civilization

Western civilization was founded on a set of philosophies that focus strongly on the sanctity of individuals and their power of logic and reason. This belief led to a desire to trust things that could be proven to be true or legitimate, from government to science. Judeo-Christian morality has formed the basis of most Western notions of ethics and behavioral standards. Thus, the attack on Western civilization must begin with the attack on the church and Christian values, and, just as important, the family unit must be undermined. The reason why the church, Christian values and family are targets of the left is they want people's loyalty and allegiance to be to the state. The church, Christianity and the family stand in the way. Let's look at some of the left's agenda.

Joe Biden, criticizing sexual assault, said, "This is English jurisprudential culture, a white man's culture," adding, "It's got to change." The Western world's culture isn't perfect but women fare better under it than any other culture. Just ask yourself: If you're a feminist, in which countries would you like to live? Would it be Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries, China or countries on the African continent, north or south of the Sahara? In those countries, women encounter all kinds of liberty restrictions plus in at least 30 countries on the African continent, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, female genital mutilation is practiced. You might ask Joe Biden what part of the "white man's culture" needs to be changed.

The greatest efforts to downplay the achievements of Western civilization start at our colleges and universities. An American Council of Trustees and Alumni 2016 study reported that "the overwhelming majority of America's most prestigious institutions do not require even the students who major in history to take a single course on United States history or government." Because of this ignorance, our young people fall easy prey to charlatans, quacks and liars who wish to downgrade our founders and the American achievement.

In 2012, 2014 and 2015, an ACTA-commissioned survey of college graduates found that less than 20% could accurately identify the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation. Less than half could identify George Washington as the American general at Yorktown. One-third of college graduates were unaware that FDR introduced the New Deal. Over one-third of the college graduates surveyed could not place the American Civil War in its correct 20-year time frame. Nearly half of the college graduates could not identify correctly the term lengths of U.S. senators and representatives.

The left in our country often suggests that people who stand up for Western civilization are supporting a racial hierarchy. The fact is that the history of the world is one of arbitrary tyrannical abuse and control. Poverty has been the standard fare for a vast majority of mankind. America became the exception to what life was like. That exceptionalism inspired imitators, and our vision of freedom and liberty spread to what has become known as the Western world.

Many do not appreciate the fact that freedom and competition in both the marketplace and idea arena unleashed a level of entrepreneurism, risk-taking and creativity heretofore unknown to mankind. Look at the marketplace of ideas. The Nobel Prize has been awarded to 860 people since its inception in 1901. The prizewinner distribution: Americans (375), United Kingdom (131) Germany (108), France (69) and Sweden (32); that's 83 percent of Nobel Prizes won. The large majority of other Nobel winners are mostly westerners. I might add that Japan has 27 Nobel Prize winners, but their first winner was awarded in 1949, after WWII led Japan to became more westernized.

There's a reason why the West leads the world in terms of scientific innovation, wealth and military might and it has little to do with genetics. Instead, it's the environment of freedom, both in the market for goods and in the idea marketplace. Rigorous competition brings out the best in mankind. Leftists and would-be tyrants find Western values offensive.

SOURCE 

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The Dangerous Seduction of ‘Free’

By offering all sorts of freebies to various constituencies, Bernie Sanders has positioned himself as the true-believing socialist in the Democratic race (even though he’s actually a member of the “top-1 percent”).

But he has plenty of competition. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren are strong competitors in the free-lunch Olympics, and most of the rest of the candidates are saying “me, too” as well.

Assuming these candidates get a warm reception, this is a worrisome development.

Part of America’s superior societal capital is (or has been) our immunity to the free-lunch message.

If that’s changing, it will be very hard to be optimistic about the future.

Antony Davies of Duquesne University and James Harrigan of the University of Arizona wrote for FEE about the dangerous – and seductive – ideology of something-for-nothing:

“… politicians are tripping over each other to offer voters more ‘free’ things, including everything from health care and college to a guaranteed basic income. But voters should be fostering a healthy sense of skepticism. If there is one eternal and immutable fact in economics, it is that nothing is free. Nothing.

… as voters, our healthy skepticism seems to go right out the window. When politicians promise all sorts of ‘free’ things, it doesn’t occur to many of us that those things can’t possibly be free. It doesn’t occur to us that, like businesses seeking our dollars, politicians will tell us whatever it takes to get hold of our votes. … Don’t be so gullible …when you hear Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders tell you how health care and higher education will be free for everyone, remember that … health care and higher education cannot and will never be free.”

Davies and Harrigan are economically right. Indeed, they are 100 percent right. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

But there are lunches that are financed by others. And that’s why I’m worried about support for these types of policy proposals.

I don’t want America to turn into Europe, with people thinking they have a “right” to a wide array of goodies, paid for by someone else.

So what’s the alternative to the something-for-nothing ideology of the modern left?

Bobby Jindal, the former Louisiana governor, recently opined on this topic in The Wall Street Journal.

“Progressives are changing the Democratic Party’s focus…to subsidizing everything for everybody. … Democrats now promise free college, free health care and more—for everyone. Republicans can’t outspend Democrats, but they can make the case for freedom and against the idea that everything is ‘free’ … The Republican ideal is … an aspirational society. … becoming dependent on government is the American nightmare. … Republicans have to do more than mock the Green New Deal … if they want to persuade young voters of the case for limited government and personal freedom.

 … ‘free’ means more government control at the expense of consumer autonomy. When progressives promise government will pay for health care and college, they are really saying government will run medicine and higher education. … ‘Free’ means less efficiency, more expense and lower quality. … ‘Free’ means robbing from America’s children. … Despite proposed marginal rates as high as 70% or even 90%, none of the tax plans Democrats have put forward would raise nearly enough revenue to pay for the promised spending. …

Republicans can’t outbid Santa Claus. Americans are willing to work hard and sacrifice for a better life but need to know how pro-growth policies benefit them. Voters may be tempted by progressives’ crazy plans … They will embrace effective market-based solutions that promote freedom if Republicans offer them.”

Gov. Jindal has a great message about trumpeting growth as an alternative to redistribution.


SOURCE 

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Video: Why doesn't Portland mayor Ted Wheeler let the police stop violence at political rallies?

The Portland Police Association is blasting Portland Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler for not allowing law enforcement to effectively deal with political violence instigated by Antifa that erupted at rallies on June 29, saying, “Police officers work to uphold the Constitution, including the right to free speech. It’s our job to ensure that our community can peacefully protest without fear of violence but right now our hands are tied. It’s time for our Mayor to… remove the handcuffs from our officers and let them stop the violence through strong and swift enforcement action. Enough is enough.”



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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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Anti-Trump fever takes threatening turn

The toxicity of the resistance to President Trump has risen in recent days, with the nation's most respected newspapers publishing rationalizations for denying Trump supporters public accommodation and for doxxing career federal employees, while a journalist found himself under physical attack from the so-called anti-fascist group Antifa, which has stepped up its violent activities since Trump's election.

The justification for denying public accommodation came from the Washington Post in an op-ed by Stephanie Wilkinson, the owner of a farm-to-table restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. Wilkinson became famous in June of last year, when she refused to serve White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders and and told Sanders and her family to leave the restaurant. Wilkinson's staff then followed the Sanders group in protest as they tried to find another place to eat.

Wilkinson later told the press she ejected Sanders because the Trump administration is "inhumane and unethical" and because the Red Hen "has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation."

In her new article, Wilkinson discussed the case of The Aviary, a trendy bar in Chicago where a waitress recently spat on Eric Trump, the president's son. Wilkinson wrote that the incident, along with her own decision to oust Sanders, shows that in the age of Trump "new rules apply" in public accommodations: Americans who work for the administration or support the president should stay away.

"If you're directly complicit in spreading hate or perpetuating suffering, maybe you should consider dining at home," Wilkinson wrote.

Wilkinson noted that "no one in the industry condones the physical assault of a patron," but at the same time declared that Americans should understand that a "frustrated person" — for example, a restaurant employee — will "lash out at the representatives of an administration that has made its name trashing norms and breaking backs." Americans should accept that such things will happen.

"If you're an unsavory individual," Wilkinson concluded, "we have no legal or moral obligation to do business with you." Better to stay home than risk the spittle. (And of course, Wilkinson and her colleagues in the hospitality industry will decide who is "unsavory.")

The apology for doxxing came from the New York Times in a piece by Kate Cronin-Furman, an assistant professor of human rights at University College London. The article focused on the treatment of illegal immigrant children in detention centers near the U.S.-Mexico border.

Cronin-Furman discussed the detentions, as well as actions by employees of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, in terms of the Holocaust and genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda. Those are, of course, contexts which most Americans would likely dismiss as preposterous and offensive but which Cronin-Furman and the New York Times apparently take seriously. Her idea is that opponents of the administration should publicly identify and shame low- and mid-level Customs and Border Protection employees who care for migrant children.

Such workers would be dismayed at being publicly shamed because they are "sensitive to social pressure," Cronin-Furman wrote, "which has been shown to have played a huge role in atrocity commission and desistance in the Holocaust, Rwanda, and elsewhere. The campaign to stop the abuses at the border should exploit this sensitivity."

"This is not an argument for doxxing," Cronin-Furman continued. "It's about exposure of their participation in atrocities to audiences whose opinion they care about. The knowledge, for instance, that when you go to church on Sunday, your entire congregation will have seen you on TV ripping a child out of her father's arms is a serious social cost to bear. The desire to avoid this kind of social shame may be enough to persuade some agents to quit and may hinder the recruitment of replacements. For those who won't (or can't) quit, it may induce them to treat the vulnerable individuals under their control more humanely. In Denmark during World War II, for instance, strong social pressure, including from churches, contributed to the refusal of the country to comply with Nazi orders to deport its Jewish citizens."

Needless to say, that was a clear argument for doxxing.

Finally, there was Antifa's recent attack on Andy Ngo, a freelance journalist often associated with the pro-free thought cultural publication Quillette. At a demonstration in Portland, at which Trump was a focus of dispute, Antifa fighters beat up and milkshaked Ngo, apparently because he was there and he was not on their side.

The president is not always at the center of such demonstrations, but Antifa has become an angry and violent fringe force in the Resistance. It has played an ugly role in a number of events, most notably Charlottesville, in which feelings about Trump have played a role.

Shunning, shaming, doxxing, attacking. As the 2020 campaign reaches full speed, would it surprise anyone to see all of it increase? And all from people who congratulate themselves for standing against hate. Perhaps our politics will cool down at some point in the future. But not now.

SOURCE 

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Unmask Antifa and Watch the Cowards Retreat

I’d urge everyone to read my colleague Jim Geraghty’s post on the thuggery this weekend in Portland. It was appalling to watch masked Antifa thugs attack Andy Ngo, and it was also appalling that the police weren’t immediately present to arrest his attackers. Antifa’s propensity to violence is well known, and while I’d love to hear a sympathetic explanation for the absence of police, the lack of response looks a lot like a dereliction of duty.

There is, however, a simple and well-known legal reform that will go a long way towards deterring Antifa violence — even when police aren’t close by, but iPhones are. It’s called an anti-masking law. They’ve long existed in the South as a check on Klan violence, and they not only make it easier for police to immediately identify and arrest criminals, they also allow witnesses to preserve the pictures and videos of violent attackers for later criminal or civil action.

When I tweeted over the weekend in support of an anti-masking ordinance in Oregon, a number of correspondents asked me if the laws were consistent with First Amendment protections for anonymous speech. The answer is generally (though not always) yes, and there’s relatively recent on-point case law in the Second Circuit saying so. While court of appeals cases aren’t nationally dispositive, the panel in Church of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan v. Kerik included Sonia Sotomayor, and its reasoning is instructive.

New York’s anti-masking law predates the Klan, tracing its history back to an 1845 effort to combat violent Hudson Valley farmers. The statute essentially prevents gatherings of masked people unless they’re gathering for a “masquerade party or like entertainment.” The panel considered a number of constitutional challenges, including claims that wearing masks was a form of expressive conduct and claims that wearing masks protected a right to anonymous speech. Regarding the first claim, the panel noted that the in the Klan context, the mask constituted a “redundant” form of expression:

The mask that the members of the American Knights seek to wear in public demonstrations does not convey a message independently of the robe and hood.   That is, since the robe and hood alone clearly serve to identify the American Knights with the Klan, we conclude that the mask does not communicate any message that the robe and the hood do not.

Similarly, Antifa mobs are full of people who wear similar “black bloc” gear. Their message and purpose is easily identifiable without a mask or scarf. As for the Klan’s anonymous speech claims, the court held that state interests in public safety trumped Klan members’ interest in deciding the precise manner in which they speak:

Assuming for the discussion that New York’s anti-mask law makes some members of the American Knights less willing to participate in rallies, we nonetheless reject the view that the First Amendment is implicated every time a law makes someone-including a member of a politically unpopular group-less willing to exercise his or her free speech rights.   While the First Amendment protects the rights of citizens to express their viewpoints, however unpopular, it does not guarantee ideal conditions for doing so, since the individual’s right to speech must always be balanced against the state’s interest in safety, and its right to regulate conduct that it legitimately considers potentially dangerous.

Anti-masking laws can be unconstitutional when applied to peaceful demonstrators seeking to protect their identities as a matter of personal safety, but that reasoning doesn’t apply to Antifa. Its members seek to engage in violence and destruction with impunity, and the mask protects them from legal accountability. If you think Antifa members like to have their identities revealed, watch this video of Alabama police officers enforcing an unmasking law at Auburn University:

SOURCE 

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Political violence in Portland, Oreg. a sneak preview of our unraveling civil society if all Americans do not denounce it

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is calling for federal law enforcement authorities to investigate Portland, Oreg. Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler after an incident where Quillette editor Andy Ngo was brutally assaulted by left-wing Antifa demonstrators on June 29 amid a nationwide scourge of political violence.

On Twitter, Cruz wrote, “To federal law enforcement: investigate & bring legal action against a Mayor who has, for political reasons, ordered his police officers to let citizens be attacked by domestic terrorists.”

In 2018, Wheeler told Portland police not to get involved when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were attacked by an Antifa mob during a 38-day demonstration at ICE facilities to protest President Donald Trump’s stance against illegal immigration.

Now, Wheeler’s hands-off-Antifa approach is coming under scrutiny as these mobs have been allowed to engage in violence and intimidation with minimal repercussions. On June 29, groups like Proud Boys showed up to support a competing #HimToo demonstration. The result was skirmishes across the city. What should have been simply two different demonstrations occurring instead turned into a scene from the Gangs of New York, with partisans kicking the crap out of each other in the streets.

Daryl Turner, President of Portland Police Association, issued a statement on Facebook decrying the violence and accusing Wheeler of tying the police’s hands, writing, “Police officers work to uphold the Constitution, including the right to free speech. It’s our job to ensure that our community can peacefully protest without fear of violence but right now our hands are tied. It’s time for our Mayor to do two things: tell both ANTIFA and Proud Boys that our City will not accept violence in our City and remove the handcuffs from our officers and let them stop the violence through strong and swift enforcement action. Enough is enough.”

Note, the Portland Police Association is denouncing violence on both sides of the skirmishes. I mention that because when President Donald Trump did the same thing, blaming both sides for the violence in Charlottesville, Va., it was wrongly pilloried. But really, it takes leadership to stand up and say political violence is destructive on all sides and must stop. You know who also said, “Violence begets violence”? Martin Luther King, Jr., who spent his career supporting non-violent protest as a mechanism for social change.

In the case of Portland, Ngo had warned about the imminent assault a day prior to the event on Twitter, writing, “I am nervous about tomorrow’s Portland antifa rally. They’re promising ‘physical confrontation’ & have singled me out to be assaulted. I went on Tucker Carlson last year to explain why I think they’re doing this: They’re seeking meaning through violence.”

Sure enough, Ngo was assaulted when he went to the event to report on it after posting several live streams on his Twitter thread. He had to go to the emergency room where he was told he had a brain hemorrhage from the attack.

Others too were attacked. Michele Malkin reported on John Blum and Adam Kelly who were also assaulted, writing, “Both John & Adam were beaten by Antifa after trying to help a gay man in a sun dress being chased down the street. While the cowards are masked, John and Adam faced the crowds openly and agreed to be named publicly. ‘I’m not afraid,’ John told me.”

One can question the wisdom of knowing that violence is being threatened and then showing up to cover or attend the event anyway. It’s an expression of free speech even to the point of danger. Ngo, Blum and Kelly clearly are standing up to the mob.

But maybe they should be afraid. These are not isolated incidents. Across the nation, Antifa demonstrators have engaged in political violence at Berkeley, in San Jose, in Chicago and elsewhere. They say they are fighting fascists or Nazis, but often the victims turn out to be journalists brandishing nothing more than smart phone camera attempting to capture these mobs in action. So, what is to be done?

The vast majority of people would prefer a civil society. Political differences in America are settled with elections. But that may be starting to change if this keeps going.

Locally, more can be done in liberal cities like Portland that I suppose are not so liberal anymore. An approach to addressing political violence will at some point require leaders to stand up and say enough is enough. There shouldn’t be a need for police associations to come forward saying they are being ordered to stand down.

Local cities need to confront rioters with riot police and shut them down. The state of Oregon has an entire chapter of the criminal code devoted “Offenses against the public order.” There shouldn’t be roving gangs brandishing weapons in a threatening manner in the streets, intimidating journalists and other bystanders and there not be a response. The outcome is in fact violence. Some are sincere partisans who are seeking it out and are looking for trouble, but invariably innocents are getting caught in the crossfire.

But Cruz has a strong point about a national approach. Organizations whose sole purpose is to use violence to achieve political ends, operating across state lines, would appear to be a matter that federal law enforcement could address. Attorney General William Barr should look into Antifa and other organizations that commit and seek out violence against their political opponents.

The scenes of political violence in Portland, Oreg. we are witnessing are just the beginning. The worst thing civil society can do in the face of it is nothing. A permissive environment is encouraging this violence and when it goes unanswered, opposing partisans appear to confront it in the streets. This is a power vacuum and a recipe for anarchy.

In short, our civil society is unraveling before our eyes.

Assuming a state of political violence is not the America we want to live in and raise our families, it’s time to let the police do their jobs. Public officials that get in the way are complicit with staging that violence. The civil society must be restored. Everyone, Republicans, Democrats and everyone in between need to speak in unison against political violence — before it’s too late. This is a sneak preview of what’s coming to all of our hometowns if we do nothing.

SOURCE 

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A Walk Into History
   
Last week, while the 20 presidential wannabes engaged in two debates and often looked like squabbling children, President Trump was commanding the world stage during a trip to Asia.

On Friday, Trump tweeted, “I will be leaving Japan for South Korea… While there, if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!”

The media, foreign policy establishment and armchair diplomats everywhere mocked Trump’s tweet, essentially saying, “Doesn’t he realize these meetings require months of preparation?"

These are the same critics who, when Trump tweeted tough responses to Kim in the past, warned that the president would get us into a war and that he needed to sit down and talk with Kim. Many commentators assured us that there was no reason to believe any meeting would result and that Trump would look stupid.

But lo and behold on Sunday, the president made history. As the New York Times put it, "From a tweet to a handshake to a historic 20 steps by an American leader into officially hostile territory."

The handshake in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) was a great photo-op, but it was more than that. The two men walked back across the border into South Korea where they met for an hour in the Freedom House, and announced that negotiations between the United States and North Korea would resume.

The Sunday talk shows were full of left-wing commentators and Democrat presidential candidates whining that North Korea still has nuclear weapons, that nothing has been accomplished, that Kim’s regime is still a threat. Today’s left truly resembles the "nattering nabobs of negativism."

Here’s a little reality check.

When Barack Obama took office, North Korea may have had a few nuclear bombs but no means of delivering them. By the time Obama left office, after having accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, North Korea had dozens of nuclear weapons and the ICBMs capable of threatening the U.S. mainland.

None of Trump’s critics today were demanding that Obama do something to stop North Korea during those long eight years. On this, like so many other things, Donald Trump is trying hard to clean up the mess his predecessor left behind.

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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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