Leftist supremacists, not white supremacists, are the big danger

The Master Party would rather destroy America than question its own superiority

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

The Democrats went into the election certain that they were going to win. The New York Times rated Hillary’s chances at 93%. The Huffington Post raised that to 98%. That was still too modest for Obama campaign manager David Plouffe who predicted a 100% likelihood of Hillary winning.

It wasn’t strategy or statistics that made the Dems think that victory was certain. It was ideology.

Obama had spent two terms telling them that they were on the “right side of history”. The more the Dems swung left, the closer to the right side of history they were. Their leftist views were naturally superior. They were based on science while their opponents were superstitious buffoons. They were enlightened while their enemies were bigots. They were smart and conservatives were dumb.

Delusions of superiority had convinced them that Republicans couldn’t win an honest election. When Bush won, it was because his brother and the Supreme Court had rigged the election. The Republican victories that swept much of the country were only due to voter suppression and redistricting.

The Democrats had allowed themselves to believe that they were so innately superior that they couldn’t lose an election except through fraud or dirty tricks. The humiliating defeats of McGovern, Carter, Mondale and Dukakis were all in the past. They had gone so far to the left that they couldn’t lose.

They had confused ideology with electability. The fallacy of fanatics is the conviction that their beliefs explain reality. And that following their beliefs must therefore lead to a successful outcome.

Leftists had convinced themselves that winning elections was an inevitable as the success of ObamaCare and the rejuvenation of the economy. Their media became a propaganda echo chamber filled with their own assurances of inevitable victory. But ObamaCare failed, the economy lingered and Trump won.

Instead of realizing that they had been lying to themselves, they seized on conspiracy theories.

Convinced of their natural superiority, members of the Master Party believed that their subjective contempt for Republicans in general and Trump specifically was an objective truth. It wasn’t that they despised conservatives. No, conservatives were inherently despicable. And Trump was so despicable and so absurd that he just had to lose. It was inconceivable that he couldn’t have lost. So he had lost.

Human beings don’t react well to having their egomaniacal fantasies come apart around them.

After losing World War I, many Germans seized on the Dolchstosslegende or the Stab-in-the-Back theory to explain what happened. The German military didn’t lose the war. It was undermined and stabbed in the back. Otherwise, despite the collapse of its allies and the entry of the United States, it would have won. The Nazis rode the Dolchstosslegende all the way into power. And to an even more devastating defeat in an even more devastating war all while trying to disprove the fact that America, the United Kingdom, France and Russia really could beat them in a war once there were no more Jews in Germany.

You can deny reality, but reality always wins.

Unsurprisingly, the Dolchstosslegende was most popular with German military leaders. Likewise the Democrat Dolchstosslegende arose from the ranks of Hillary’s campaign leaders. It’s those in charge of the losing team who have the most incentive to blame anyone and everyone else. The Nazis blamed a long list of people including the Jews. The Democrats blamed everyone from the FBI to the Russians.

Hillary has become another Hindenburg touting her own Dolchstosslegende. Her latest book, ‘What Happpened’, will put the Dolchstosslegende into print. It will list everyone who lost the election for her. ‘What Happened’ may be an awkward title, but calling it ‘Mein Kampaign’ might have been a bit much.

The Hillary Dolchstosslegende tearing apart our country passes itself off as patriotism. The Nazis claimed that they were patriots too. But Dolchstosslegendes aren’t patriotic. They’re exercises in divisiveness by losers who don’t want to take responsibility for their stupidity, incompetence and hypocrisy.

Hillary went from pressing a reset button with one of Putin’s minions to a posthumous political campaign claiming that Putin had rigged the election. Never mind that even if Russian hackers did leak Podesta’s emails, less than 1% of Americans have any idea who Podesta is or cared about the contents of his chats. But Podesta’s emails embarrassed the future promoters of the Dolchstosslegende.

And that’s why the Dolchstosslegende’s humiliated inventors are obsessed with their own emails.

John Podesta and Robby Mook had formulated the Russian Dolchstosslegende after her defeat. Podesta and Mook, like General Ludendorff and Hindenburg had the most need to assign failure elsewhere. And millions of loyalists were eager to be convinced that they had not truly been defeated.

The Clinton campaign was as big of a disaster as the Hindenburg Program. Both were Socialist projects that substituted technocracy for common sense leading to utter disaster. Rather than admit that their plan didn’t work, Hindenburg and Ludendorff blamed the defeat on the battlefield and misery at home on a conspiracy. The Nazis then tried to prove that a Socialist militarized industry could work once you got rid of all the possible conspirators. After killing six millions Jews, National Socialism still didn’t work.

Meanwhile Clintonworld had been trying to prove that Hillary’s ’08 loss to Obama was a fluke. They proved it by rigging the Dem primaries only to have Hillary lose the general election. And so out came more excuses. Hillary was an unbeatable candidate. The left was unbeatable. It was a conspiracy.

The myths of the undefeated Germany and the undefeated Democrats were rooted in a false conviction of superiority. A populace glutted on an endless diet of propaganda found it inconceivable that they had lost. As a dog returns to its vomit, the Democrats began licking the propaganda out of their media sewer twice as hard. They ate up the lies that they hadn’t lost, the promises that they would soon reclaim what was rightfully theirs and that everyone who had conspired against them would soon be punished.

Then they turned to street violence and attempted coups… because those worked so well in Germany.

At the maddest there are the ravings of Twitter experts who promise that the intelligence community will shortly be rounding up and executing all the traitors. But even the mainstream media, CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times feed their readers a poisonous glut of the Dolchstosslegende.

It’s bad for the Democrats and it’s worse for the democracy.

Instead of learning from their defeat, an entire political party, its elected officials and a sizable portion of its base have convinced themselves once again that a presidential election was illegitimate. They have staked their hopes on a coup, ranging from military intervention to impeachment, to undo it all.

Instead of questioning the superiority of their leftist ideology, they have doubled down on it. Like the National Socialists, the Socialist supporters of the far left have turned to street violence, they fantasize about military coups and media coups, without caring about the damage that they are doing to America.

The Democrats believed that they would win the election because their left-wing politics were absolutely right. Now they are convinced that they will pull off their coup because they are even more fanatically left-wing in 2017 than they were in 2016. This same logic led the Nazis to destroy Germany. And the Democrats have learned absolutely nothing about the dangers of delusional fanaticism.

They were told that they are on the right side of history. And if the right side of history requires wrecking the political process, a coup and a civil war, they are willing to pay it. Just as in the election, they can’t lose because they’re on the right side of history. Wherever they end up must be utopia.

They are willing to destroy everything rather than question their delusions of superiority.

The Soviet Union attributed all its setbacks to sabotage, rather than policy failures. Muslims continue to believe that they lost their last Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, due to an assortment of conspiracies from the Jews and the Freemasons. The Dolchstosslegende is as ubiquitous as it is destructive. It is seductive because it tells us the lie that we most wish to believe in our darkest hour.

 The lie is that we did nothing wrong and do not need to change.

The Democrats’ Dolchstosslegende is the surest way of turning 2020 into a repeat of 2016.

SOURCE

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THE CHARLOTTESVILLE BIG LIE

To my surprise, on Fox News’ “Outnumbered,” the usually thoughtful Kennedy said about President Trump’s reaction to the Charlottesville violence, “If he had said the right words, we wouldn’t be talking about this.” Sorry, Kennedy, but you’re wrong. No matter what Trump would have said, the left, as well as the FNM and establishment sewer rats in the Republican Party, would have found fault with it.

That said, what most people have missed in this ugly story is that while hysteriacs in the FNM scream relentlessly that “there is only one side to this” (i.e., that white supremacists were the only ones resorting to violence in Charlottesville), the actual facts tell a much different story.

Let’s get this out on the table once and for all without fear of ugly backlash:  White supremacists are hateful and potentially dangerous, to be sure, but, fortunately, they are relatively few in number.  Consider that out of a population of 330 million, the white supremacists in Charlottesville attracted only about 500 like-minded people.

The other major fact that the FNM is totally ignoring is that it’s the Radical Left, not the right, that resorts to violence on a regular basis, as seen in Ferguson, Baltimore, Berkeley, and elsewhere throughout the United States.  It’s not surprising then that they were more than happy to engage in battle the right-wing protesters in Charlottesville.

Numerous pundits have pounced on the FNM talking point that putting the Radical Left on the same moral plane as white supremacists is outrageous.  In the words of fearless truth-teller David Webb, such a contention is intellectual cowardice at its worst.

The whole thing is an attempt to do what the Radical Left does best — intimidate those people with opposing views into silence.  Of course the Radical Left is just as bad as white supremacists.  Why are so many people afraid to admit something that is so clearly supported by the raw facts?  Doing so doesn’t mean that you support white supremacists, only that you are being honest.

As I have repeatedly stated, violence is the most prominent trademark of the Radical Left, not only in the United States, but throughout the world.  The one thing that makes these angry folks worse than white supremacists, if that’s possible, is that they put their hatred on display 365 days a year.

By contrast, white supremacists, despicable as they may be, are so pathetic and so small in numbers that, as much as the FNM would like us to believe otherwise, right-wing violence is, thankfully, exceedingly rare in America.

So I guess you could say that the one good thing that came out of the Charlottesville melee is that it reminded thinking people — repeat, thinking people — that white supremacists are not a serious threat to Americans.  If they were, this single event would not have received such over-the-top coverage.  It’s precisely because we don’t hear much from this loathsome group of losers that the Charlottesville brawl was such big news.

The truth be known, the Radical Left has been hoping for a showdown like Charlottesville for a long time.  The tragic Oklahoma City bombing of a federal building more than two decades ago, as horrific as it was, has grown stale, and the Radical Left has desperately needed a violent event instigated by right-wing extremists.

I should point out here the obvious fact that white supremacist groups do not represent conservative values.  True conservatives stand unequivocally against violence, regardless of who perpetrates it, and believe in free speech for everyone.  By contrast, the Radical Left openly advocates violence and actively tries to shut down speakers with whom it disagrees.

As to Donald Trump, he’s been in the public spotlight for more than four decades, and during that time there has never been a hint of bigotry attributed to him — i.e., not until he did the unthinkable and became a president intent on draining the swamp in Washington.  For committing such an unforgivable sin, he is now compared to Adolf Hitler and Kim Jong-un.

All this is once again a reminder of the overarching problem when it comes to racism —identity politics, which is a cowardly tool the Radical Left never tires of using.  It’s also important to understand that the key to the success of the Radical Left when it comes to identity politics is the support it receives from Republican toadies like Marco Rubio, John McCain, Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan.  If Republicans had the moral courage to hang together like the Democrats do, identity politics would be overwhelmed and buried under the facts.

Disgusting is the only way I can describe the total disregard for the facts surrounding Charlottesville by the FNM, toady Republicans, and, of course, all liberals.  The FNM has reached yet another new low in its false portrayal of the Charlottesville rioting and Donald Trump’s response to it, and it is yet another example of The Big Lie that Joseph Goebbels so openly spoke about:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.  It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Goebbels would have loved the big lie that is being perpetuated about Charlottesville.  David Webb had it right when he used the term “intellectual cowardice,” because it perfectly describes the immoral folks who are pushing a false narrative about the violence in Charlottesville — the same folks who gave us that never-to-be-forgotten whopper, “Hands up, don’t shoot.”

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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U.S. Has 3.5 Million More Registered Voters Than Live Adults — A Red Flag For Electoral Fraud

Elections: American democracy has a problem — a voting problem. According to a new study of U.S. Census data, America has more registered voters than actual live voters. It's a troubling fact that puts our nation's future in peril.

The data come from Judicial Watch's Election Integrity Project. The group looked at data from 2011 to 2015 produced by the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, along with data from the federal Election Assistance Commission.

As reported by the National Review's Deroy Murdock, who did some numbers-crunching of his own, "some 3.5 million more people are registered to vote in the U.S. than are alive among America's adult citizens. Such staggering inaccuracy is an engraved invitation to voter fraud."

Murdock counted Judicial Watch's state-by-state tally and found that 462 U.S. counties had a registration rate exceeding 100% of all eligible voters. That's 3.552 million people, who Murdock calls "ghost voters." And how many people is that? There are 21 states that don't have that many people.

Nor are these tiny, rural counties or places that don't have the wherewithal to police their voter rolls.

California, for instance, has 11 counties with more registered voters than actual voters. Perhaps not surprisingly — it is deep-Blue State California, after all — 10 of those counties voted heavily for Hillary Clinton.

Los Angeles County, whose more than 10 million people make it the nation's most populous county, had 12% more registered voters than live ones, some 707,475 votes. That's a huge number of possible votes in an election.

But, Murdock notes, "California's San Diego County earns the enchilada grande. Its 138% registration translates into 810,966 ghost voters."

State by state, this is an enormous problem that needs to be dealt with seriously. Having so many bogus voters out there is a temptation to voter fraud. In California, where Hillary Clinton racked up a massive majority over Trump, it would have made little difference.

But in other states, and in smaller elections, voter fraud could easily turn elections. A hundred votes here, a hundred votes there, and things could be very different. As a Wikipedia list of close elections shows, since just 2000 there have been literally dozens of elections at the state, local and federal level decided by 100 votes or fewer.

And, in at least two nationally important elections in recent memory, the outcome was decided by a paper-thin margin: In 2000, President Bush beat environmental activist and former Vice President Al Gore by just 538 votes.

Sen. Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat, won his seat by beating incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman in 2008. Coleman was initially declared the winner the day after the election, with a 726-vote lead over Franken. But after a controversial series of recounts and ballot disqualifications, Franken emerged weeks later with a 225-seat victory.

Franken's win was enormous, since it gave Democrats filibuster-proof control of the Senate. So, yes, small vote totals matter.

We're not saying here that Franken cheated, nor, for that matter, that Bush did. But small numbers can have an enormous impact on our nation's governance. The 3.5 million possible fraudulent ballots that exist are a problem that deserves serious immediate attention. Nothing really hinges on it, of course, except the integrity and honesty of our democratic elections.

SOURCE

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Trump-Endorsed Immigration Bill Would Save Taxpayers Trillions

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump endorsed the RAISE (Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment) Act introduced by Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and David Perdue, R-Ga., a bill to reform the merit-based immigration system and limit low-skill immigration.

Low-skill immigration is very costly to U.S. taxpayers. For example, a legal immigrant without a high school degree typically receives $4 in government benefits for every $1 he pays in taxes.

By limiting future low-skill immigration, the RAISE Act has the potential to save U.S. taxpayers trillions of dollars in future years.

There are 12.8 million low-skill legal immigrants with a high school degree or less currently residing in the U.S. The households headed by these low-skill legal immigrants impose a net fiscal cost (total government benefits received minus total taxes paid) of $150 billion each year.

The $150 billion tax burden is equivalent to a $1.04 tax on every gallon of gas purchased by U.S. motorists every year for the foreseeable future.

The RAISE Act seeks to curtail future fiscal costs linked to low-skill immigration by eliminating chain migration, the visa lottery, and the current low-skill worker allotment. It also caps the future flow of refugees and asylees.

Nearly 400,000 legal immigrants enter the U.S. through these channels each year. The majority of these appear to be low-skill.

The bill’s reforms to chain migration are particularly important.

Chain migration starts with a foreign citizen who is given a green card. This individual is allowed to bring in his or her nuclear family consisting of a spouse and minor children.

Once the original immigrant and his or her spouse become U.S. citizens, they can petition for their parents, adult sons and daughters, and adult siblings and brothers- and sisters-in-law to also enter.

This second group can bring their minor children. Once they become citizens, the brothers- and sisters-in-law and parents can petition for their siblings, in-laws, and parents to legally enter the U.S.

The RAISE bill limits future chain migration. Each future migrant can bring only nuclear family members.

Parents can be brought to the country on a guest visa but will not be given access to government benefits or citizenship status. The sponsors must demonstrate that they have purchased insurance to cover the future medical costs of the parent.

The U.S. tax and benefit system is redistributive—it provides extensive benefits to less skill/low-wage individuals while asking them to pay comparatively less in taxes. On average, low-skill individuals, whether non-immigrants, legal immigrants, or illegal immigrants, impose substantial costs on U.S. taxpayers.

The report’s calculation of government benefits is comprehensive—it includes routine government services such as police and fire protection, highways and sewers; public education costs; benefits from over 80 means-tested welfare programs such as Medicaid, food stamps, the earned income tax credit, and housing vouchers; and other government direct benefits, including Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance.

The report also provides a comprehensive analysis of taxes paid at the federal, state, and local levels, including personal income taxes, FICA taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes, property, and business taxes.

Having estimated the government benefits received and the total taxes paid, the report then analyzes the fiscal balance (total government benefits received minus total taxes paid) for immigrants and non-immigrants with different levels of education.

The report shows that less educated individuals, whether immigrants or non-immigrants, receive far more in government benefits than they pay in taxes.

In particular, the report provides 75-year projections for the fiscal balance of immigrants and their immediate descendants based on the immigrant’s education level. It measures future cost in "net present value."

Based on the National Academy of Sciences’ estimates, the average low-skill immigrant (with a high school degree or less) who enters the country imposes a net present value on taxpayers of negative $142,000.

This means the government would need to immediately raise a lump sum of $142,000 and put it in a high-yield bank account to cover the future net fiscal cost (total benefits minus total taxes) of that immigrant.

The National Academy of Sciences’ cost figures represent a mixture of costs for legal and illegal immigrants. The RAISE Act is focused directly on low-skill legal immigrants.

Since low-skill legal immigrants receive more benefits, their fiscal impact is greater than similar illegal immigrants. The net present value for a legal immigrant with a high school degree or less is around negative $170,000, and the undiscounted long-term fiscal cost (benefits minus taxes) would be around $476,000 in constant 2012 dollars.

Over the last decade and a half, an average of 470,000 low-skill adult immigrants (both legal and illegal) have arrived in the U.S. each year. The net present value of this inflow is around negative $67 billion per year.

Of course, in the next year another 470,000 would arrive, requiring another lump sum payment of $800 per taxpaying household. The year after, another 470,000 will arrive, requiring another $800 per taxpaying household, and so on.

Fiscal costs can also be analyzed per decade. Under existing government laws and policies, an estimated 4.7 million low-skill immigrants (both legal and illegal) are likely to enter the U.S. over the next decade.

The fiscal net present values of these immigrants to the taxpayers will be around negative $670 billion. In other words, government would need to immediately raise taxes by $670 billion to cover the future costs.

Of course, the government will not actually raise taxes in this manner—instead, the future costs will be hidden and passed on to future taxpayers.

The future net outlays (benefits given less taxes paid) for the inflow of 4.7 million low-skill immigrants will be around $1.9 trillion (in constant 2012 dollars).

Over half these costs are linked to future low-skill legal immigration. By limiting future legal low-skill immigration, the RAISE Act could save at least $1 trillion.

Additional large savings could be achieved by limiting future illegal immigration. These saving figures apply to only a single decade of low-skill immigration. Similar savings would occur by limiting low-skill immigration in subsequent decades.

Opponents of such reforms argue that such immigration increases the gross domestic product.

It is true that immigration increases the GDP, but as Harvard immigration economist George Borjas explains, 98 percent of the increase "goes to the immigrants themselves in the form of wages and benefits."

Metaphorically speaking, low-skill immigrants increase the economic pie, but they eat nearly all the increase themselves.

Low-skill immigration reduces the wages of similar U.S.-born workers. An immigration-induced increase in the low-skill labor force of 10 percent can reduce the wages of low-skill non-immigrant labor by 3 to 10 percent.

Some studies show wage losses as high as 17 percent. Black male wages and employment are especially hard hit. By reducing wages of less skilled non-immigrants, low-skill immigration increases economic inequality in the U.S., redistributing income from the least advantaged Americans to the more affluent.

Finally, low-skill immigration shifts the political balance in the nation.

According to Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, the political alignment of immigrants is far to the left that of non-immigrants. Immigrants in general are twice as likely to identify with and register as Democrats than as Republicans.

This pattern is somewhat more pronounced among immigrants without a high school degree who are almost three times as likely to register as Democrats than as Republicans.

Low-skill immigration imposes large fiscal costs on U.S. taxpayers. It drives down the wages and employment of the disadvantaged American workers (especially black males), and it arbitrarily shifts the political balance in the U.S.

The RAISE Act would appropriately address these problems.

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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A very small update:

I will probably have to delete this post some time -- but -- I have just spent several hours drinking  hard likker with my son.  He drinks Bourbon.  I drink gin. And we have decided that -- much as we love Mr Trump -- Steve Bannon is the man who really speaks for us.  We understand that he is not the right man for political compromise but we are still grateful to have a man of great influence who represents us!

An update to an update:

I failed to mention that my son had a bottle of a single-malt whisky from Islay -- that a good friend had given him for his birthday. So I got a wee dram of that at one stage. And it was exactly the peaty taste that you expect from Islay.

The pedagogue in me comes out even in my cups, however, so I note that Islay is in the Inner Hebrides due west of Glasgow -- hence the famous song about Islay: "Westering home":

Why did the police stay idle during the Charlotteville mayhem?

There are common police methods to deal with such situations and have been for decades.  That they were not used suggests instructions from on high, most likely from Democrat governor McAuliffe. Did McAuliffe WANT mayhem so he could puff up himself by condemning it?

There’s the role police are supposed to play in upholding the law and preventing violence.

It’s a thankless job most of the time, and police must walk a fine line between respecting peaceful First Amendment activity and maintaining the peace, while not overstepping the limits of the Fourth Amendment.

For whatever reason—which only the police and government officials are privy to—the police failed to do their job at the Charlottesville demonstration, a charge levied by both the Alt Right and the counterdemonstrators.

The same police who in the past have responded to any acts of disorder or disobedience with the full power of their uniform and weapons were curiously lax in the face of outright violence.

As a Rolling Stone reporter recounted, "Unlike other events I’ve covered where anti-fascist protesters face off with white supremacists, the police make no effort to cordon the two groups off from each other to prevent violent clashes before they happen."

Despite the fact that 1,000 first responders (including 300 state police troopers and members of the National Guard)—many of whom had been preparing for the downtown rally for months—had been called on to work the event, despite the fact that police in riot gear surrounded Emancipation Park on three sides, and despite the fact that Charlottesville had had what reporter David Graham referred to as "a dress rehearsal of sorts" a month earlier when 30 members of the Ku Klux Klan were confronted by 1000 counterprotesters, police failed to do their jobs.

In fact, as the Washington Post reports, police "seemed to watch as groups beat each other with sticks and bludgeoned one another with shields… At one point, police appeared to retreat and then watch the beatings before eventually moving in to end the free-for-all, make arrests and tend to the injured."

"Police Stood By As Mayhem Mounted in Charlottesville," reported ProPublica.

"Could Police Have Prevented Bloodshed in Charlottesville?" asked The Atlantic.

"Police Response Inadequate at Charlottesville Rally," concluded U.S. News.

"There was no police presence," a peaceful activist explained. "We were watching people punch each other; people were bleeding all the while police were inside of barricades at the park, watching. It was essentially just brawling on the street and community members trying to protect each other."

Cornel West echoed this sentiment. "The police didn’t do anything in terms of protecting the people of the community, the clergy," he told The Washington Post.

So what should the police have done differently?

For starters, the police should have established clear boundaries—buffer zones—between the warring groups of protesters and safeguarded the permit zones.

Instead, as eyewitness accounts indicate, police established two entrances into the permit areas of the park and created barriers "guiding rallygoers single-file into the park" past lines of white nationalists and antifa counterprotesters.

This is where the worst of the violence between protesters took place.

By 8:40 am protesters had already started gathering in the downtown area. Police failed to separate them.

By 10 am, a "mob of white supremacists formed a battle line across from a group of counter-protesters." Police looked on and did nothing.

By 11 am, the general unrest had dissolved into all-out disorder. Police did not step in.

All the while protesters were throwing urine-filled water bottles, pepper spray and smoke bombs, and clobbering one another with flag poles and shields, Brian Moran, Virginia’s secretary of public safety and homeland security, watchedfrom a command post overlooking the downtown area and did nothing.

Moran watched while fights broke out and police stood by and failed to intervene.

Only at 11:22 am, after hours of brawling and confrontations between the protesters, did Moran take action by calling on Governor Terry McAuliffe to declare a state of emergency. Only then did police mobilize to declare the gathering an unlawful assembly, "cutting off the rally before it officially began," and begin clearing demonstrators out of the park.

There were other models that could have been followed.

As investigative reporter Sarah Posner notes, "At a neo-Nazi rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, just days before the November election, police employed this tactic with success – while the rally attendees and anti-fascist protesters taunted each other over a barrier of police, they were blocked from coming into physical contact. But in Charlottesville, the police inaction creates a sense of pandemonium."

A good strategy, advises former federal prosecutor Miriam Krinsky, is to make clashes less likely by separating the two sides physically, with officers forming a barrier between them. "Create a human barrier so the flash points are reduced as quickly as possible," she said.

In Cleveland, the site of the GOP presidential convention, "Trump diehards, Revolutionary Communists, Wobblies, and Alex Jones disciples" faced off in a downtown plaza. Yet as The Atlantic reports, "Just as confrontations between the groups seemed near to getting out of hand, police swooped into the square in huge numbers, using bicycles to create cordons between rival factions. The threat of violence soon passed, and no pepper spray or tear gas was needed."

For that matter, consider that Charlottesville police established clear boundaries just a month earlier in which they maintained clear lines of demarcation at all times between KKK protesters and counterprotesters. Indeed, the primary violence at the July 8 Klan rally came when police used tear gas and pepper spray to force protesters to disperse.

SOURCE

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ACLU Blames Cops for Charlottesville Violence

Ronald Bailey

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA:  Those fights erupted despite the fact that state, city, and police officials mobilized 1,000 first responders, including 300 state police and National Guard members, to control the protests. Many of the cops wore riot gear, carried shields, and were backed by armored vehicles.

Corinne Geller, a spokeswoman for the Virginia State Police, has said the plan was to keep the two sides separated. "There were physical barriers to separate those opposing sides and law enforcement as well, however individuals chose to assemble on the streets," she told The Wall Street Journal. "We are not in a position to tell people where to assemble."

So what happened?

"It is the responsibility of law enforcement to ensure safety of both protesters and counter-protesters. The policing on Saturday was not effective in preventing violence," said Virginia ACLU chief Claire G. Gastanaga in a statement. "I was there and brought concerns directly to the secretary of public safety and the head of the Virginia State Police about the way that the barricades in the park limiting access by the arriving demonstrators and the lack of any physical separation of the protesters and counter-protesters on the street were contributing to the potential of violence.

They did not respond. In fact, law enforcement was standing passively by, seeming to be waiting for violence to take place, so that they would have grounds to declare an emergency, declare an 'unlawful assembly' and clear the area."

Here's what I saw as a reporter. First, a disclaimer: I am not a policeman, a lawyer, or a frequent participant in public protests. Second, nobody is ever justified in punching people for their political beliefs, no matter how much I detest their views.

That being said, I noticed a great difference in how the cops and barricades were deployed when a month earlier I covered a KKK rally at Charlottesville's Stonewall Jackson statue. At that rally, double-fenced metal barricades separated the Klansmen from the counterprotesters. This created a no-man's-land where a line of police stood, keeping each side from coming into physical contact with each other. Police evidently had no problem telling the Kluxers where to assemble. I stood within 20 feet of the KKK during their whole demonstration, and a not single rock, bottle, or any other missiles were thrown by either them or the hundreds of counterprotesters. And no one got punched or bashed with clubs either.

This past weekend, by contrast, police deployed a single line of metal barricades which could easily be reached across. They placed no police between the racists and the counterprotesters. When I got to the park, the police and National Guard all appeared to be standing on the sides and behind—not in-between, as they did at the KKK rally.

The state of emergency had apparently been called just as I approached the park, and riot police were marching in to clear out the area. A line of police behind shields basically pressed the neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates down Market Street between crowds of counterprotesters who had lined the street. Despite the dangerous decision to remove them by that route, I am happy to report that I saw only a few scuffles break out between the racists and the counterprotesters.

It is hard to believe that the police were less prepared at this event than at the Stonewall Jackson rally. Sadly, Gastanaga's assertions ring true.

SOURCE

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Ted Cruz "owns" the NYT

After Cuban-American U.S. Senators Cruz and Marco Rubio forcefully denounced white nationalists and called for a full Federal investigation into Saturday’s fatal attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, a New York Times reporter made the mistake of trying to pick a Twitter fight with Cruz.

“Sorry to be cynical, but most of all Rubio and Ted Cruz to me seem mostly to be doing a tremendous job of posturing for 2020,” tweeted reporter Eric Lipton Sunday.

Big mistake:  “Gosh, you’re right,” Cruz shot back. “Because Nazis & the Klan have such love for Cuban-Americans. If only we worked for a paper that shilled for Stalin….”

Cruz continued, “I know it’s hard to understand. Too many schools don’t teach NYT’s shameful history covering up Soviet atrocities.”

Cruz “attached a link to the Wikipedia article on Walter Duranty, a New York Times journalist who ignored the famine suffered under Josef Stalin in his Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting from the USSR,” The Washington Examiner reports.

Lipton did not respond to his pants-down whipping from Cruz.

SOURCE

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TRUMP APPROVAL GOES UP AND PEOPLE AGREE WITH HIM ON CHARLOTTESVILLE

Well ain’t this a bitch for the left wing media and riot instigators? Since Charlottesville, the media has been in total meltdown mode blaming Trump for the violence over the past weekend

But in a repeat of myriad Trump campaign controversies, voters didn’t share the same level of outrage as the elites. The latest wave of polling shows that the president’s overall job-approval rating has inched upwards since the controversy, that a sizable majority of Americans support maintaining Confederate memorials instead of tearing them down, and that a notable minority agree with the president’s use of “both sides” language during Tuesday’s press conference.

More HERE

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Please boycott and do NOT use $1 and $20 bills depicting slave owners on them. Send to me. I will dispose of them properly. Thank you.



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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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There are none so blind as those who will not see

A typical bit of obtuseness from the Leftist media below. They refuse to see that Trump was commenting on the diverse makeup of the Charlotteville marchers and pretend that he was calling the extremist minority "good people".  There were among the marchers a small minority who displayed swastika and KKK symbols but the great majority did not.  They were there simply to protest the escalating attack on historic statues.  Trump has consistently commented on that mix but the media simply ignore it, misleading many Republicans as a result.

But it suits the Leftist media to pretend that all the marchers were white supremacists.  Given that assumption, what they say has some force.  But it is an unproven assumption.  None of the marchers interviewed made any supremacist claims.  Instead they complained that traditional American culture was being suppressed by Leftist political correctness.  They simply wanted liberty from oppression.

So Trump was right.  There were sincere and reasonable people on both sides and he refused to tar them all with the "supremacist" brush.  It is a legitimate area of disagreement over whether symbols from an unhappy past should be preserved but that disagreement was grievously amplified by a small number of extremists on both sides


After President Trump’s defiant and roundly criticized remarks about a violent rally by white nationalists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., Americans are confronting profoundly uncomfortable questions.

Was he giving a sign that he subscribes to the ideology of white supremacy? Or was he attempting to enable the movement because it feeds his political base?

At an angry press conference Tuesday, Trump blamed “both sides’’ — white nationalists and their counterprotesters — for the violence that left one protester dead. He called those who were marching to Nazi chants “very fine people.” And he pulled a page from the white supremacist playbook when he referred to the removal of Confederate monuments as a changing of American “history” and “culture.”

Beyond the immediate shock his statements caused, an intensifying chorus of academics, politicians, and a biographer said years of accumulating evidence indicates that the Trump on display Tuesday was indeed the real Donald Trump, someone who is at the very least accepting of ethnic hatred and white bigotry.

SOURCE

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President Trump Again makes himself perfectly clear

He again defies the abusive and unproven media assertion that all the marchers were "white supremacists".  Sad that it takes the president to correct a crazed media

Ignoring the outcry over his response to the Charlottesville protests, President Trump on Thursday further waded into the controversy, calling it "foolish" to remove "our beautiful statues and monuments."

In three mid-morning tweets, the president wrote:

"Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You.....

"...can't change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson - who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish! Also...

"...the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!"

While Trump sees them as objects of beauty and history, some other Americans view the statues as monuments to traitors and symbols of hatred, racism, etc.

The newly ignited, not-so-civil war of words has dominated the headlines since Saturday, when critics say Trump failed to properly denounce the white supremacists who rallied against the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue from a public park in Charlottesville.

In later comments, Trump said not everyone who rallied against the removal of the statue was "bad."

“If you look, they were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee," Trump said on Tuesday. "I'm sure in that group there were some bad ones. The following day, it looked like they had some rough, bad people -- neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them.

"But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest, because you know -- I don't know if you know, they had a permit. The other group didn't have a permit.

"So, I only tell you this, there are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was a horrible moment for our country, a horrible moment. But there are two sides to the country,” Trump said.

SOURCE

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When Liberals Club People, It's With Love in Their Hearts

Ann Coulter
 
Apparently, as long as violent leftists label their victims “fascists,” they are free to set fires, smash windows and beat civilians bloody. No police officer will stop them. They have carte blanche to physically assault anyone they disapprove of, including Charles Murray, Heather Mac Donald, Ben Shapiro, me and Milo Yiannopoulos, as well as anyone who wanted to hear us speak.

Even far-left liberals like Evergreen State professor Bret Weinstein will be stripped of police protection solely because the mob called him a “racist.”

If the liberal shock troops deem local Republicans “Nazis” — because some of them support the duly elected Republican president — Portland will cancel the annual Rose Festival parade rather than allow any Trump supporters to march.

They’re all “fascists”! Ipso facto, the people cracking their skulls and smashing store windows are “anti-fascists,” or as they call themselves, “antifa.”

We have no way of knowing if the speakers at the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally last weekend were “Nazis,” “white supremacists” or passionate Civil War buffs, inasmuch as they weren’t allowed to speak. The Democratic governor shut the event down, despite a court order to let it proceed.

We have only visuals presented to us by the activist media, showing some participants with Nazi paraphernalia. But for all we know, the Nazi photos are as unrepresentative of the rally as that photo of the drowned Syrian child is of Europe’s migrant crisis. Was it 1 percent Nazi or 99 percent Nazi?

As the “Unite the Right” crowd was dispersing, they were forced by the police into the path of the peace-loving, rock-throwing, fire-spraying antifa. A far-left reporter for The New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, tweeted live from the event: “The hard left seemed as hate-filled as alt-right. I saw club-wielding ‘antifa’ beating white nationalists being led out of the park.”

That’s when protestor James Fields sped his car into a crowd of the counter-protesters, then immediately hit reverse, injuring dozens of people, and killing one woman, Heather Heyer.

This has been universally labeled “terrorism,” but we still don’t know whether Fields hit the gas accidentally, was in fear for his life or if he rammed the group intentionally and maliciously.

With any luck, we’ll unravel Fields’ motives faster than it took the Obama administration to discern the motives of a Muslim shouting “Allahu Akbar!” while gunning down soldiers at Fort Hood. (Six years.)

But so far, all we know is that Fields said he was “upset about black people” and wanted to kill as many as possible. On his Facebook page, he displayed a “White Power” poster and “liked” three organizations deemed “white separatist hate groups” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. A subsequent search of his home turned up bomb-making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition and a personal journal of combat tactics.

Actually, none of that is true. The paragraph above describes, down to the letter, what was known about Micah Xavier Johnson, the black man who murdered five Dallas cops a year ago during a Black Lives Matter demonstration. My sole alteration to the facts is reversing the words “black” and “white.”

President Obama held a news conference the next day to say it’s “very hard to untangle the motives.” The New York Times editorialized agnostically that many “possible motives will be ticked off for the killer.” (One motive kind of sticks out like a sore thumb to me.)

In certain cases, the media are quite willing to jump to conclusions. In others, they seem to need an inordinate amount of time to detect motives.

The media think they already know all there is to know about James Fields, but they also thought they knew all about the Duke lacrosse players, “gentle giant” Michael Brown and those alleged gang-rapists at the University of Virginia.

Waiting for facts is now the “Nazi” position.

Liberals have Republicans over a barrel because they used the word “racist.” The word is kryptonite, capable of turning the entire GOP and 99 percent of the “conservative media” into a panicky mass of cowardice.

This week, Mitt Romney and Sen. Marco Rubio — among others — instructed us that masked liberals hitting people with baseball bats are pure of heart — provided they first label the likes of Charles Murray or some housewife in a “MAGA” hat “fascists.”

Luckily, the week before opening fire on Republicans, critically injuring House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, Bernie Sanders-supporter James Hodgkinson had used the vital talisman, calling the GOP “fascist.” So you see, he wasn’t trying to commit mass murder! He was just fighting “Nazis.” Rubio and Romney will be expert witnesses.

And let’s recall the response of Hillary Clinton to the horrifying murder of five Dallas cops last year. The woman who ran against Trump displayed all the moral blindness currently being slanderously imputed to him.

In an interview on CNN about the slaughter that had taken place roughly 12 hours earlier, Hillary barely paused to acknowledge the five dead officers — much less condemn the shooting — before criticizing police for their “implicit bias” six times in about as many minutes.

What she really wanted to talk about were the two recent police shootings of black men in Baton Rouge and Minneapolis, refusing to contradict Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton’s claim that the Minneapolis shooting was based on racism.

Officers in both cases were later found innocent of any wrongdoing. Either the Left has had a really bad streak of luck on its police brutality cases, or bad cops are a lot rarer than it thinks.

Some people would not consider the mass murder of five white policemen by an anti-cop nut in the middle of a BLM protest a good jumping-off point for airing BLM’s delusional complaints about the police. It would be like responding to John Hinckley Jr.‘s attempted murder of President Reagan by denouncing Jodie Foster for not dating him.

Or, to bring it back to Charlottesville, it would be as if Trump had responded by expounding on the kookiest positions of “Unite the Right” — just as Hillary’s response echoed the paranoid obsessions of the cop-killer. Trump would have quickly skipped over the dead girl and railed against black people, Jews and so on.

That is the precise analogy to what Hillary did as the bodies of five Dallas cops lay in the morgue.

Thank God Donald J. Trump is our president, and not Mitt Romney, not Marco Rubio and not that nasty woman.

SOURCE

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Upcoming Boston rally shows where the aggression comes from

The city plans to dispatch more than 500 police officers to patrol Saturday’s “Boston Free Speech” rally on Boston Common Saturday, and city officials vowed to shut it down if it turns violent, as they prepared for what is one of the first big demonstrations since the violence in Charlottesville, Va., last week.

Authorities fear white supremacists will attend, and two of the rally’s keynote speakers have ties to extremist elements — including one who attended the Charlottesville rally.

Rally organizers have maintained the event is open to all political views and not a forum for hate groups, and the permit issued by the city is for only 100 people. But tens of thousands of counterprotesters are expected to show up to denounce racism and anti-Semitism.

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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A Korean triumph for Trump

The media were hysterical at Trump's strong threat to North Korea.  But it worked.  Kim Jong Un backed down.  The media response?  Crickets.  Kim just ignored Obama but having a real man in the White House made a difference.  It pushed the world back from nuclear war.  See here

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Summary of recent events

Black people who were never slaves fighting white people who were never Nazis over a confederate statue erected by Dems. Media blames Trump!

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Virginia State Police Say They Didn't Find Caches of Weapons in Charlottesville

Another lying Democrat

Contradicting statements by Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the Virginia State Police say they did not find caches of weapons stashed around Charlottesville in advance of last Saturday's deadly white nationalist rally.

In an interview Monday on the Pod Save the People podcast, hosted by Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson, McAuliffe claimed the white nationalists who streamed into Charlottesville that weekend hid weapons throughout the town.

SOURCE

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Senator Tim Kaine‏ says:

Charlottesville violence was fueled by one side: white supremacists spreading racism, intolerance & intimidation. Those are the facts.

So what caused this violence?



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Trump's reward



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Progressives Use Violence to Whitewash History  

The awful violence this past weekend in Charlottesville is the inevitable culmination of the Left’s goal of achieving the complete eradication of opposing viewpoints. Whitewashing history (pardon the pun) and engaging in political violence are tools to that end.

As the Dallas Morning News observantly noted, “History is not easily compartmentalized. It isn’t simply right versus wrong, black versus white, or blue versus gray. But there’s an entire crowd of folks who want to do just that because they believe it is all those things, and most egregiously, they believe there is an individual right for all to go through life unoffended.”

Dr. Lee Cheek, senior fellow of the Alexander Hamilton Institute, concurred, noting, “The events in Charlottesville have no connection to understanding the political traditions of the American South, and everything to do with battles among professional ideologues without any attachment or knowledge of the historical situation.”

Millions of Southerners are proud of their heritage for reasons that have nothing to do with slavery. They revere Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who stated in 1856, five years before the commencement of the War Between the States, “Slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country.” Lee is heralded as a brilliant military strategist who served America faithfully in the Mexican War and as Superintendent of West Point. However, when called upon by President Abraham Lincoln to lead Union forces against the seceding South, he declined, incapable of bearing arms against his family, friends and home state. He accepted the commission as commander of Confederate forces in order to defend his beloved state of Virginia. Following the war, Lee worked tirelessly to convince his fellow Southerners to seek peace and reconciliation.

None of this matters to the Left, though. There is no understanding of the complexities of history, no appreciation for context. Slavery has existed throughout human history, regardless of color or nationality. In fact, there are more people enslaved worldwide today than ever before, including slavery practiced by Muslims. Mohammad owned slaves. One wonders if American progressives will now call for banning all things Islamic.

Indeed, how far will this go? Historical monuments of the Confederacy are being removed in Memphis, Lexington, Baltimore, New Orleans and elsewhere to appease angry leftists. These fascists even desecrated an Atlanta monument dedicated to unity and reconciliation.

Violent leftists have rioted in recent years in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Chicago, Ferguson, Charlotte, Berkeley, DC, Oakland and other cities, destroying businesses, setting cars on fire, and dragging people from their cars and beating them, declaring their right to do so because of past and current “injustices” — such as hearing words they don’t like.

As detestable as the KKK and white supremacists are, they have a right to speak and to peaceably assemble. Our First Amendment was written specifically to protect unpopular speech, and we show our own intolerance by silencing those with whom we disagree. The violence in Charlottesville would not likely have occurred had not the leftist agitators shown up looking to pick a fight, though the murderous Nazi thug is obviously responsible for his own actions.

So again we ask, how far does this go?

Do we eliminate all monuments to Democrat/progressive hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who opposed anti-lynching legislation, turned a blind eye to the Nazi eradication of Jews, and imprisoned 100,000 Japanese-Americans? What about progressive icon and racist Woodrow Wilson, who re-segregated the federal workforce?

Progressives have already declared war on Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, who owned slaves but sought to prohibit slavery in the newly formed nation. They now call for taking down the Jefferson Memorial.

Even Lincoln, author of the Emancipation Proclamation, is not immune to leftist hatred. The Lincoln Memorial was desecrated Tuesday. Is that because Lincoln, a staunch opponent of slavery, was willing to save it in order to preserve the Union, or because he also believed in the superiority of the white race?

If we truly want to rid our nation of its shameful history regarding racism, let’s start by abolishing the racist Democrat Party. After all, it was the Democrats who waged war to preserve slavery, founded the KKK, enacted Jim Crow laws, and fought against Republican efforts to pass the Civil Rights Act.

Democrat President Andrew Jackson owned slaves and signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

It was Harry Truman who wrote to his wife, “I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s not a n—er or a Chinaman.”

It was the Democrat Party that praised Senator and former KKK Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd until his death a few years ago, a man who filibustered the Civil Rights Act for 14 hours. It was Lyndon Johnson, a virulent racist but a political pragmatist, who told two Southern Democrat governors his signing of the Civil Rights Act would “have those n—ers voting Democrat for 200 years.” And it’s Johnson’s “Great Society” that has yielded today’s urban poverty plantations, where blacks slaughter other blacks without too much notice from the Leftmedia.

What about Bill Clinton, whining of the upstart Obama, “A few years ago, this guy would have been carrying our bags”? Or the absolute devotion of Democrats to Planned Parenthood, founded by eugenicist Margaret Sanger for the express purpose of exterminating blacks through abortion and sterilization? According to Tuskegee University, the KKK lynched 3,446 blacks in 86 years. Planned Parenthood is a white supremacist’s dream, killing more blacks in two weeks than the KKK killed in a century. And the Democrat Party fights to ensure that $500 million a year in taxpayer funds is funneled to Planned Parenthood to kill all of those black babies.

Surely we could at least agree to remove the Seattle monument to Vladimir Lenin? Anyone? Anyone?

How far do we go? Are we willing to engage in violence and oppression of opposing viewpoints? If so, then Charlottesville will only be the beginning.

SOURCE

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More Leftist violence.  Where is the media uproar about this?

Is it only Leftist lives that matter?

A West Goshen, Pennsylvania man shot his GOP neighbor twice in the head and killed him late Monday night. Clayton Carter, an unhinged anti-Trump fanatic, shot his neighbor twice in the head on his neighbor’s property.

Clayton Carter has anti-Trump signs sprinkled on his lawn. He has a history of arguments with his neighbors.

The victim G. Brooks Jennings was murdered while his wife watched Clayton stand over her husband and shoot him in the head.
ABC6 reported:

A man is under arrest, accused of killing his next door neighbor in West Goshen, Chester County. Police have charged Clayton Carter, 51, in the shooting death of G. Brooks Jennings.

More HERE

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On the lighter side

Under the heading, "A Conservative manifesto from England", I have just put up in my sidebar a link to some quotations from Jacob Rees-Mogg, a very old-fashioned and very popular Conservative member of the House of Commons in London. He is noted for his humorous speeches. His comment on small businessmen cracked me up. See here

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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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Trump tells it like it is

Is he the only one who is immune to the tidal wave of media hysteria and lies? He is immensely valuable if he is.  Anyone who has seen the graphics coming out of Charlotteville must be aware of the violent attacks on the marchers by Antifa but that seems to be unmentionable to the Left.  Trump saw it and tells what he saw.  He will not let pass the claim that the Left were peaceful.  Ever since the French revolution, the Left have NEVER been peaceful unless they had to be. So it's a sad day when it needs the President to tell people what the media will not.  I am pleased to say that I have been saying much the same as Trump on my various blogs


Donald Trump launched an extraordinary and angry defense of his performance in the wake of the Charlottesville riots Tuesday in a free-wheeling, finger-pointing confrontation with the press at Trump Tower.

He lashed out at his critics following a botched response to the weekend's Charlottesville murder, insisting that a violent 'alt-left' mob came to protests ready for war but a dishonest news media is shielding them from blame.

The president even defended elements of the far-right protest, claiming some were 'fine people' protesting against the removal of Confederate symbols.

'You had some fine people. But you also had trouble makers,' he said during a Q&A session in the lobby of Trump Tower – an event that was supposed to be a press event about infrastructure projects.

'You see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and the baseball bats,' he said, describing what he said had happened in the Virginia college town.

While the vehicular homicide of a liberal protester, allegedly by a neo-Nazi who is now charged with her murder, has grabbed the nation's attention, Trump insisted that 'you had a lot of bad people in the other group too.'

His aides had expected him to address infrastructure and the press conference began with praise for his new plan to make it simpler to build, but quickly veered off course.

He offered the comment as a defense of his Saturday statement in which he ad-libbed that there had been 'bigotry and violence on many sides.'

Those words prompted a second statement on Monday that more forcefully denounced white supremacists.

'What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?' he asked reporters on Tuesday, answering questions with questions. 'Do they have any semblance of guilt?'

'Let me ask you this: What about the fact that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs. Do they have any problem? I think they do.'

'And you had a group on one side that was bad and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent,' Trump said. 'And nobody wants to say that.' 'But I'll say it right now.'

'I think there's blame on both sides,' he added as he attacked the political press. 'And I have no doubt about it, and you don't have any doubt about it either.'

Trump's reference to the 'alt-left' is a nod to so-called 'Antifa' protesters, short for 'anti-fascist,' a movement that has seen its own violent protests aimed at conservatives.

But Ku Klux Klansmen and white nationalists in Nazi regalia stole the spotlight over the weekend. The protest was explicitly planned as 'Unite the Right' and sought permission under that name.

Behind the scenes, Trump aides reacted with a range of emotions that ranged from fist-pumping to head-shaking. 'That's our president,' one White House official aligned with the populist, nationalist wing of the Trump camp, told DailyMail.com. The aide was glad that Trump 'said the truth, no matter what the reporters think.'

Another, from a different wing, however, was shell-shocked. 'That wasn't in the plan. None of it was supposed to happen,' the aide said.

There was equal shock among some of the most senior Republicans.  Florida Senator Marco Rubio tweeted a lengthy statement about the danger of suggesting anyone other than neo-Nazis shares the blame for Saturday's violence

'The organizers of events which inspired & led to #charlottesvilleterroristattack are 100% to blame for a number of reasons,' he wrote in a series of tweets. 'They are adherents of an evil ideology which argues certain people are inferior because of race, ethnicity or nation of origin.'

'When entire movement built on anger & hatred towards people different than you, it justifies & ultimately leads to violence against them. These groups today use SAME symbols & same arguments of #Nazi & #KKK, groups responsible for some of worst crimes against humanity ever.

'Mr. President, you can't allow #WhiteSupremacists to share only part of blame. They support idea[s] which cost nation & world so much pain. The #WhiteSupremacy groups will see being assigned only 50% of blame as a win. We can not allow this old evil to be resurrected.'

House Speaker Paul Ryan didn't fault Trump directly, but made it clear that he agreed with Trump's statement on Monday condemning neo-Nazis. 'We must be clear. White supremacy is repulsive,' Ryan tweeted. 'This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.'

Florida Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen struck a more aggressive chord. 'Blaming "both sides" for #Charlottesville?! No,' she tweeted. 'Back to relativism when dealing with KKK, Nazi sympathizers, white supremacists? Just no.'

Trump's words were quickly denounced by Democrats as an attempt to draw moral equivalence between Nazis and liberal activists. 'As a Jew, as an American, as a human, words cannot express my disgust and disappointment. This is not my President,' tweeted Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz. 'There has to be room for people of all political stripes among the coalition of the sane. We all need to take our country back together.'

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, issued a scathing statement saying that Trump's 'continued talk of blame 'on many sides' ignores the abhorrent evil of white supremacism, and continues a disturbing pattern of complacency around acts of hate from this President, his Administration and his campaign for the presidency.'

'There is only one side to be on when a white supremacist mob brutalizes and murders in America. The American people deserve a president who understands that,' she said.

Conservative columnist Ann Coulter was quick to defend Trump, however, 'Nearly the entire quisling 'conservative' media immediately caved to the B.S. left-wing media narrative on Charlottesville. NOT TRUMP!' she tweeted.

Trump insisted Tuesday that many on the political right who gathered in Charlottesville were peaceful protesters themselves who aimed to save a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from the scrap heap.

The city is removing it in line with many others across the old South, under pressure to renounce ties to slavery.

'Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch. Those people were also there because they wanted to protest the taking down of a statue,' he said.

Trump's claim at the 15-minute question-and-answer in Trump Tower that leftists 'came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs' has some basis in reports of what happened in Charlottseville.

The Washington Post on Monday described the situation in Charlottesville on Friday night, at the statue of Thomas Jefferson on the lawn of UVA as around 250 white far-right protesters met a group of 30 counter-protesters - and that both sides were armed in some form.

'Within moments, there was chaos. Shoves. Punches. Both groups sprayed chemical irritants,' the paper reported.

The next day, it said, armed anti-right wing protesters were present in Emancipation Park from around 8.30am.

'Members of anti-fascist groups yelled at the rallygoers. Many of them also carried sticks and shields,' the paper said.

 And the New York Times reported that not all the anti-far-right protesters were violent. It noted the presence of a group called Redneck Revolt, which had up to 20 people present carrying rifles and which describes itself as 'a pro-worker, anti-racist organization that focuses on working class liberation from the oppressive systems which dominate our lives' and claims to be inspired by John Brown, the anti-slavery rebel.

Trump challenged reporters to imagine the nation stripped of symbols of its slave-owning Founding Fathers, while conceding that local communities should ultimately decide the fate of statuary dedicated to Confederate war heroes.

'George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status?' he asked.

'Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think Thomas Jefferson? You like him? Okay, good. Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner.'

'You're changing history, you're changing culture,' Trump carped, saying of the right's more thoughtful, permitted protesters that 'the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.'

'You had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest.'            

Speaking of James Alex Fields Jr., the 20-year-old white nationalist accused of running down a woman with his car as fellow racists egged him on, Trump called him 'a disgrace to himself, his family and his country.'

He wouldn't say if the murder was an act of terrorism, calling the question a quibble over 'legal semantics.'  But 'the driver of the car is a murderer,' Trump said without naming him. 'And what he did is a terrible, horrible thing.'

He also defended his chief strategist Steve Bannon, whom Democrats and some news outlets regularly clobber as a racialist at the very least who guided the Breitbart News to prominence by kowtowing to alt-right bigots and at worst is a white supremacist.

'He's a good man. He's not a racist, I can tell you that,' the president said, while not offering the embattled Bannon his full-throated approval as he fights to keep his job. 'He's a good person, and I think frankly the press treats him very unfairly,' he said.

Trump said Tuesday that his widely panned insistence on Saturday that there had been bigotry and violence 'on many sides' – an ad-libbed line that prompted Monday's do-over – was a prudent step to make sure his statement didn't get ahead of the facts as investigators knew them.

'I'd do it the same way,' he declared. 'And you know why? Because I want to make sure when I make a statement that the statement is correct. And ... there was no way of making a correct statement that early.' 'I had to see the facts, unlike a lot of reporters.'

Trump claimed that on Saturday he was unaware that David Duke, the infamous former Klan leader, was present at the scene of the riot.

'I wanted to see the facts,' he said again. 'And the facts as they started coming out were very well-stated.'

'In fact, everybody said, "His statement was beautiful; if he would have made it sooner, that would have been good." I couldn't have made it sooner because I didn't know all of the facts. Frankly, people still don't know all of the facts.'

SOURCE

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What motivated the fatal car collision?

A reader writes:

I've seen the videos of the "car plowing into the crowd". Several things become evident to anyone watching the video. First the car was slowly following other cars down a street with protestors crowding both sides, at one point someone steps off behind his car and swings at it, despite the distance you can hear the impact.

That evidently startles the drivers who then plows into the demonstrators who had stepped between his car and the previous car. A number of other protestors mobbed the car at that point striking it and attempting to break out its windows. The driver quickly backed up striking those who had jumped behind his car which is where the majority of those who were struck got hurt.

By that time it was apparent that there was no way he would be safe in that violent crowd. Those are all points his lawyer is going to be raising when this goes to trial.

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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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Facing the reality of HiTech

Here is the reality:

"In 2014, tech companies Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Apple, and others, released corporate transparency reports that offered detailed employee breakdowns. In May, Google said 17% of its tech employees worldwide were women, and, in the U.S., 1% of its tech workers were black and 2% were Hispanic. June 2014 brought reports from Yahoo! and Facebook. Yahoo! said that 15% of its tech jobs were held by women, 2% of its tech employees were black and 4% Hispanic. Facebook reported that 15% of its tech workforce was female, and 3% was Hispanic and 1% was black. In August, Apple reported that 80% of its global tech staff was male and that, in the U.S., 54% of its tech jobs were staffed by Caucasians and 23% by Asians. Soon after, USA Today published an article about Silicon Valley's lack of tech-industry diversity, pointing out that it is largely white or Asian, and male. "Blacks and Hispanics are largely absent," it reported, "and women are underrepresented in Silicon Valley — from giant companies to start-ups to venture capital firms".

It's an unbudgeable gap. The companies concerned are very politically correct and have made great efforts to alter the pattern of their employment -- but with negligible success.  The industry concerned runs on IQ and the level of IQ required is just not generally available outside white and Asian males.

The only way to get more women and minority employees in the sector would be to drop recruitment standards.  And doing that would rapidly hand the entire industry over to China.  China already has an IQ advantage over America so will probably take charge eventually anyway but the innovativeness of American firms is so far keeping America in the lead.  Doing anything to degrade the performance of the sector would be fatal.  My software developer son has been to China three times recently in order to teach computer people there some skills they did not currently have and he has only one word for the Chinese:  "Unbeatable".

What I think outsiders don't get is how complex computer programming is.  It requires the utmost attention to detail and constant creativity to find a way ahead through the task.  For some of us that comes easily but for most people it just cannot be done.  Many years ago, I tried to teach FORTRAN to sociology students at a major university but in the end none of them really "got" it. They were smart but not that smart. And the composition of silicon valley firms is a loud announcement of where the required level of talent is mostly to be found. The Leftist preoccupation with equality is just madness in that sphere.  It could very easily become destructive madness. Reality is unco-operative with Leftist dreams -- JR

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It is a caricature of what happened in Charlottesville to call Trump and his supporters racists

Since Trump’s ascendancy, there have been repeated outbreaks of violence, mostly perpetrated by Antifa against ordinary Republicans and other conservatives, either at pro-Trump rallies or on other public platforms. These people have been either stopped from speaking or physically attacked by Antifa and other left-wing demonstrators.

Such attacks on mainstream conservatives have been ignored, downplayed or even endorsed by Democrats and their media acolytes.

In June the House Republican whip, Steve Scalise, was shot and almost killed by a Bernie Sanders-supporting Democrat who opened fire on a group of Republicans at a baseball practice. A New Jersey Democratic party activist, James Devine, posted on his Facebook page that he had “little sympathy” for Scalise because he opposed gun restriction policies. Another Democratic party official in Nebraska was fired after saying he was “glad” that Scalise had been shot.

The real target is mainstream American values and culture
The Democratic establishment dismisses such people as mavericks with no significance for the left-wing causes they support. Yet a double standard operates against President Trump, who is held to be personally defined by the unacceptable nature of a tiny minority of his supporters.

The fact that the former Ku Klux Klan “grand wizard” David Duke, who was at Charlottesville, claims to support Trump’s agenda (that is, when he’s not in the next breath condemning him) is being used to smear Trump himself as a white supremacist.

It is grotesque to equate Trump’s pledge to “make America great again”, which was endorsed by the 63 million Americans who voted for him, with the bigotry of white supremacism. The former is driven by people wanting to uphold core American values they deeply cherish and share with each other. The latter is driven by loathing of racial and ethnic groups deemed to be inferior.

In last year’s presidential campaign Hillary Clinton was endorsed by Will Quigg, “grand dragon” of the Ku Klux Klan’s California chapter. He claimed she had a “hidden agenda” and that if elected she would come out for gun ownership and sealing America’s borders. Quigg’s support of Clinton was rightly dismissed as either mischief-making or barking mad. Yet when such people support Trump, this is held to define him.

The left’s real target is not the far right but mainstream conservatives who want to uphold American values and culture: the people who brought Trump to power. Defending national identity, however, is denounced by western progressives as white racism.

The result is an unholy alliance between the left and the far right. A white supremacist called Richard Spencer invented the blanket term “alt-right” to associate his ilk with conservatives seeking merely to defend American identity and core values. Through this tactic, Spencer intended to boost the far right and simultaneously smear and thus destroy regular conservatives.

The left has seized upon this smear with unbridled joy, routinely using the “alt-right” term to try to destroy the national identity agenda by bracketing it with white supremacism. The result is a powerful boost for the far right. From deserved obscurity, they suddenly find the left are transmitting their every utterance to the world. The phrase “useful idiots” comes inescapably to mind.

Charlottesville was but the latest front in what has become America’s cultural civil war. It won’t, alas, be the last.

SOURCE

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ObamaCare Is Dumping Millions of Middle Class to Insure More Poor

While Democrats and Republicans fret over millions "losing" coverage to reform, the actual law is taking its toll.

Barack Obama and the Democrats’ “Affordable” Care Act was never really about making the cost of health care more affordable. It was never about giving Americans greater access to health care. ObamaCare was always a scheme designed to give the government greater power to control and redistribute Americans’ wealth, essentially taking from the middle class to give it the poor — and to insurance companies.

While Democrats like to point to the increasing numbers of individuals receiving ObamaCare’s subsidized insurance coverage, they are ignoring a dirty little secret. The number of Americans with unsubsidized individual coverage has decreased precipitously. From March 2016 to March 2017, some 2.6 million fewer people had unsubsidized policies, an overall decrease of 15% in one year alone.

But the unsubsidized coverage bleed is not limited to the individual market. Since 2013, the year before ObamaCare began subsidizing plans, the number of individuals with employment-based coverage has decreased by almost three million.

Doug Badger of National Review describes the issue:

The narrative nevertheless endures. Believing it requires indifference to millions of people who can no longer afford individual policies and to millions more who may forfeit their policies with the next round of rate hikes. For many of them, Obamacare has been a serial nightmare, producing policy cancellations, skyrocketing premiums and deductibles, and a narrowing choice of doctors before finally leaving them uninsured.

Obamacare is insuring more poor people and uninsuring millions of middle-income people. That suits the Democratic party and many congressional Republicans just fine. They measure social progress in the number of people receiving government assistance. Those struggling to pay their own way evoke little sympathy. Lawmakers of both parties, whose consciences were lacerated by CBO’s theory that millions would “lose” coverage under the GOP’s “repeal and replace” legislation (most of those “losses” the result of people voluntarily dropping insurance once the individual mandate was repealed) are unmoved that millions actually have lost coverage under the law they fought to preserve.

Obama was a leftist who was bound and determined to foist his socialism onto the American people. Health care was his means to that end, and so far too many Americans and their representatives in Congress are content to sell their freedom for the mirage of greater security and health.

SOURCE

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Problems with AG Jeff Sessions

The two big issues I have with Sessions are his intention to escalate the so-called war on drugs, and his support for civil asset forfeiture.

The war on drugs is misnamed. It is not a war on inanimate objects, it is a war on American citizens who make choices some people in government don’t like. As for civil asset forfeiture–government’s ability to take people’s property without even accusing them of a crime–I honestly don’t see any defense for it that is compatible with basic principles of due process and liberty.

Sessions seems to have gained a bit of support from Trump for his attack on sanctuary cities, I’m sorry to see. My sorrow here has nothing to do with sanctuary cities and everything to do with the war on drugs and civil asset forfeiture. I don’t feel I’m being extreme in expressing dissatisfaction with an attorney general who has so little respect for individual rights.

SOURCE

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CA: More Costs Flowing from Dam Negligence

National Water Quality Month is turning out rather dry in California, but trouble will soon be washing up in court. Farmers and business owners have filed more than 90 claims against the state government for causing a total of $1.7 billion in losses from the spillway failure at Oroville Dam back in February. Might they have a case?

As we noted, the failure of the spillway prompted the evacuation of 200,000 people, hardly a frivolous move, because if the spillway collapsed it could have caused complete failure of the dam, built in 1968.

As it turned out, government engineers knew for decades that the dirt spillway was unreliable but failed to reinforce it with concrete. As Representative John Garamendi (D–Walnut Grove) famously put it, the dirt spillway “worked fine until it had to be used, in which case it didn’t work so well.” State water bosses also failed to add gates above the spillway, which would have allowed the reservoir to rise another ten feet. Governor Jerry Brown claimed to be unaware of these problems and proclaimed, “stuff happens and we respond.”

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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