The Totally, Utterly Irrefutable Case Against Socialism

When a dozen of conservatism’s best minds take on Socialism and expose it for the utopian fraud it is, attention must be paid.

In a brief foreword to a special issue of National Review, Editor-in-Chief Richard Lowry admitted that many conservatives thought socialism in America had been “vanquished” after the collapse of Soviet Communism 30 years ago. But as T. S. Eliot insisted, “There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.”

The experts examine socialism in its many guises, beginning with Charles Cooke’s blunt assessment that socialism is not and never can be “democratic.”

Cooke, the editor of NationalReview.com, writes that voters should not be fooled by the left’s attempt at rebranding.

“There is no sense in which socialism can be made compatible with democracy as it is understood in the West.” At worst, says Cooke, “socialism eats democracy, and is swiftly transmuted into tyranny.” At best, socialism “stamps out individual agency, places civil society into a straitjacket of uniform size, and turns representative government into a chimera.”

Cooke’s description of socialism as tyrannical was confirmed by Ugo Okere, a socialist candidate for the Chicago City Council, who explained that “democratic socialism, to me, is about democratic control of every single facet of our life.”

That would mean, presumably, rewriting the first words of the Constitution to something like, “We the people of the United States in order to form a more democratically controlled Union … ”

What has Okere’s “democratic control” produced in the socialist “paradise” of Venezuela?

Ricardo Hausmann, the former chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank, has written that “Venezuela’s economic catastrophe dwarfs any in the history of the U.S., Western Europe or the rest of Latin America.”

How catastrophic? Under Chavez-Maduro socialism, the child mortality rate has increased 140%. Ninety percent of Venezuelans now live in poverty. This year inflation will hit an unbelievable 10 million percent. (That is not a typographical error.) All this in a country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves—far greater than those of the United States.

Cooke concludes his essay with lessons learned from 6,000 years of civilization, including “never relinquish the right to free speech, the right to free conscience, the right to freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, or the right to a jury trial.”

Whatever you do, he warns, don’t be seduced by socialists bearing promises. But if you are seduced, “get out before it’s too late. You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

The distinguished author Joshua Muravchik, a fellow at the World Affairs Institute, takes a historical approach to the myths of socialism.

He writes that the initiator of Soviet terror, tyranny, and violence was its founding father, Vladimir Lenin, who exhorted his followers to exert “merciless mass terror against kulaks, priests, and White Guards; persons of doubtful standing should be locked up in concentration camps” (i.e., the Gulag).

To what end? Not just to accumulate political power, but in pursuit of a sacred mission—a socialist world.

When the farmers resisted collectivization, Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin, engineered a famine in which at least 5 million and perhaps as many 10 million starved to death—the Holodomor.

If Stalin was “a tyrant of stupefying brutality,” writes Muravchik, he was outdone by Communist rulers Mao Zedong, whose Cultural Revolution resulted in at least one million deaths, and Pol Pot, who wiped out one-fourth of Cambodia’s population in his attempt to emulate Mao.

Why did they kill so many? Muravchik provides the answer: “It was their devotion to an ideal [socialism] that prompted them to slaughter millions of unresisting innocents.”

Economist Jeffrey Tucker begins with the damning comment: “Among the most conspicuous of socialism’s failings is its capacity to generate vast shortages of things essential for life.”

In Maoist China, he points out, there was no meat and no fat in which to cook anything. In Bolshevik Russia, there was never enough housing or food, not even loaves of bread.

What happened when Nikita Khrushchev took over as Soviet leader following Stalin’s death in 1953? He and his colleagues tried desperately to “cobble together” a system of planning that made sense without relying on “bourgeois” market forces.

They failed miserably. In Tucker’s words, Khrushchev “spent his last years as a discredited, dejected, and sad old man on a park bench.”

If you love deprivation, constriction, and general limits on material aspirations, says Tucker, plus a “tyrannical ruling class that oppresses everyone else, you will love what socialism can and does achieve.” Indeed, he concludes, “misery seems to be its only contribution to economic history.”

Socialists, says National Review correspondent Kevin Williamson, are guilty of a fatal conceit: They think they can develop a system so powerful that it can consider every variable in society and propose scientific answers “about how many acres of potatoes to plant, and when and where to plant them.”

But free-market economists Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek (a Nobel Laureate) showed that “complete knowledge was not attainable on social, economic, or political questions.”

Therefore, says Williamson, the more intelligent and non-ideological governments have largely given up on central planning.

Even the Nordic social democracies, so dear to the self-styled socialists of the United States, “mostly have been divesting themselves of state enterprises.”

Reasonably successful state-run enterprises, such as the Swiss railroads, “have been converted into stock corporations or reformed in other market-oriented ways.”

The subtitle of Hayek’s last work “The Fatal Conceit” is “The Errors of Socialism.” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have failed to learn from those errors, says Williamson, asserting that “you cannot call yourself the party of science and the party of socialism too. You have to choose one or the other.”

Socialists flaunt their compassion, argues former National Review Editor-in-Chief John O’Sullivan, because it gives them an excuse to impose their will on others “unlawfully and even murderously.”

Modern socialists tend to disapprove of placing conditions on aid to the poor—“workfare”—viewing the receipt of aid as “an unqualified right.”

That sounds generous, says O’Sullivan, but it traps the poor “in long term dependency” and undermines what the scholar Shirley Letwin calls the “vigorous virtues” among their neighbors.

Before a single socialist regime had established itself, says O’Sullivan, 19th-century writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky, W. H. Matlock, and Rudyard Kipling saw “the horrors that lay concealed within socialism’s humanitarian promise.” Their examination of country after country refutes the fraying excuse that socialism has never been tried.

In the later stages of Soviet Communism, for example, a woman would sell herself for a pair of jeans; in Venezuela today, “people exchange family heirlooms for a little food.”

Although the French welfare state is often offered as a shining example of progressivism, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, declares you must look at “actual France, not the fantasy France of progressive propaganda.”

He challenges the French elite who believe they have the right “to order society for the benefit of everyone.”

Given the results of their leadership—low growth, mass unemployment, social strife, and a general mood of pessimism—Gobry suggests that “they might want to rethink their idea of progress.”

BT (Before Thatcher), the Great Britain of the 1970s was generally described as “the sick man of Europe,” due to its prolonged experiments with statism and the pervasive stagnation they produced.

In 1960, according to historian Andrew Stuttaford, the U.K. boasted Europe’s most productive economy, but that was before the Labour Party came to power and nationalized almost every industry in sight.

The mid-1970s were hard on most Western economies, but the U.K. “appeared to be in a hell of its own,” says Stuttaford. Inflation shot up 300%. Gross domestic product fell, unemployment rose, the pound crumbled, industry buckled, “and some of Britain’s best and brightest headed for the exit.”

The winter of 1978 was characterized by grotesque images—the dead unburied, the sick untreated, the trash piling up in the streets.

Just months later, promising radical change, Margaret Thatcher walked into 10 Downing Street and proceeded to denationalize coal, steel, and utilities; bring down inflation; spur economic growth; and refuse to give into organized labor’s draconian demands.

Her message: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

Markets, not bureaucrats, are better for the environment, asserts Shawn Regan, a fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, pointing out that Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union “were the most polluted and degraded places on earth.”

He quotes the economist Murray Feshbach and journalist Alfred Friendly Jr. as writing that when historians conduct an autopsy of Soviet Communism, “they may reach the verdict of death by ecocide.”

Closer to home, says Regan, the attempts of Cuban socialists to maximize production at all costs “has caused extensive air, soil, and water pollution.”

In Venezuela, socialist policies have contaminated drinking water supplies, fueled rampant deforestation, and caused frequent oil spills. The principal guilty party is the state-owned energy company.

Rarely, if ever, will Ocasio-Cortez and other sponsors of the Green New Deal concede the painful truth about socialism’s dismal environmental legacy.

Imagine a shoe store with just one brand of sneakers—now apply that to medical care. So begins journalist and health care expert Avik Roy, who explains the pluses and minuses of the British National Health Service, so beloved by Sanders and other American “democratic” socialists.

Because the British health system is funded entirely by taxes and is “free” to patients, there are no premiums, no co-pays, no deductibles.

How then does the system prevent excess consumption and control costs?

Roy says there are two principal ways: first, by controlling the fees that doctors, hospitals, drug companies, etc. receive; and second, by “aggressively restricting the … costly services that would otherwise blow up” the health care budget.

Notwithstanding Sanders’ contrary opinion, says Roy, “the NHS is no paradise.”

NHS doctors “routinely” conceal from patients information about new therapies the service does not pay for, so as not to “distress, upset or confuse them.”

Terminally ill patients are “incorrectly classified” as close to death to allow the withdrawal of expensive life support. Most NHS patients expect to wait five months for a hip operation or knee surgery, says Roy, but the actual waiting times are worse: 11 months for hips and 12 months for knees, compared with a wait of three to four weeks for such procedures in the United States.

NHS problems like limitations on access to care and dishonest statistics “will be familiar to those enrolled in America’s homegrown version of socialized medicine: the Veterans Health Administration.”

Understandably, writes Roy, American socialists are not calling for “VA care for all” but for “Medicare for All.”

Medicare features like subsidized premiums and unlimited access, says Roy, make the program popular with seniors who receive about $3 in benefits for every dollar they pay into Medicare. But the lack of controls has turned the program into an “oppressive fiscal burden.”

According to the trustees, the Medicare hospital trust fund will run out of money in 2026, less than a decade away. The ultimate price tag of Medicare for All is an incomprehensible $30 trillion.

The solution may be debatable (The Heritage Foundation, for example, favors block grants to the states and health savings accounts), but the answer is not “the Anglo-Canadian version of socialized medicine that tramples on individuals’ rights to seek the care and coverage that they want.”

The real reason why American socialists are 24/7 news, says Washington Examiner editor Timothy Carney, is the widespread “social and cultural poverty” in America.

The root cause of both Occupy Wall Street and Bernie 2016 was a “prevailing sense of alienation.” Young people, Carney says, “felt that they lost the ability to make a difference in the world.” They were a vacuum waiting to be filled.

Modern American society “in which community is weaker and people are more alienated,” says Carney, has proven a fertile ground for socialism. The political reaction from socialists and their fellow travelers is “a demand for a bigger federal safety net.”

Carney reports, for example, that the People’s Policy Project, a socialist think tank, calls for a raft of federal programs, including 36 weeks of federally funded paid parental leave, federally funded child care, a federal benefit for stay-at-home mothers, and federally funded pre-K.

The conservative response, Carney argues, should be “community.” That is, an extended family, neighbors, parishes, shuls, civic associations, dinner clubs, swim clubs, and all the other communal variations.

Such institutions—Edmund Burke’s “little platoons”—help families stay together, mothers and fathers “stay sane,” and new parents “navigate the daunting path of parenthood.”

Carney warns that the less we’re connected to one another via community institutions, and the more isolated we are, the more we grasp for something big to protect us. “For young Americans that’s often the state.”

Socialism is not only or even principally an economic doctrine, concludes the British author Theodore Dalrymple, “it is a revolt against human nature.” It refuses to believe that man is a fallen creature and seeks to improve him “by making all equal one to another.”

The development of the New Man was and is the goal of all Communist tyrannies, beginning with the Soviet Union.

Notwithstanding the disastrous results when such futile dreams are taken seriously by ruthless men in power, Dalrymple says, there are those who will continue to dream of “a life so perfectly organized that everyone will be happy.”

National Review’s analysts believe that such dreams will inevitably become nightmares as they have in the 40 some nations that suffered under socialism.

The record of failure without exception is clear. It remains for conservatives to expose the impossible promises of the socialists, drawing on the conclusions of National Review’s experts:

Socialism is not compatible with the Constitution.

Socialism, the idea that millions killed for, is a mirage.

Socialism is very good at generating vast shortages of the essential things in life.

Socialism can never know enough to plan all our lives every day.

Socialism tries to make all of us equal to one another.

Socialism is very good at promising all the benefits we’ll never see.

Socialism in Great Britain had one outstanding success—Margaret Thatcher.

Socialism was responsible for making Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union the most polluted and degraded places on earth.

Socialized medicine as practiced in Great Britain and Canada is bad for people’s health.

American socialism is on the rise because of widespread social and cultural poverty in America.

What is to be done? It rests with you and me. We must get to work exposing socialism for the fraud and failure it is and taking back our culture and our country.

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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Jordan Peterson’s year of trauma

Health problems.  A great mind in a frail body

Interviews with the Canadian academic, clinical psychologist and culture war belligerent Jordan B. Peterson can go badly wrong, sometimes for the interviewer, sometimes for Peterson. Sometimes for both.

His most infamous encounter was with Cathy Newman on Britain’s Channel 4 News last year, an interview that has been watched more than 16 million times. Although Newman’s approach seemed designed to confirm Peterson’s reputation among the liberal left as a misogynist, most think she was worsted by him.

After that, however, she received such violent abuse online that Peterson intervened on Twitter to ask his supporters to stop threatening her.

Eighteen months on, he is not exactly extending the hand of friendship. “I thought it was very underhanded of her to come out and play the victim. It wasn’t like I was attacking her,” he says from his home in Toronto.

The problem, I think, is that Peterson and his interviewers assume the lobster position when they meet. Those who have read the first rule of his bestselling 12 Rules for Life will know what I mean. “Stand up straight with your shoulders back,” it orders, citing in support the claw-waving, boxer champ-dancing, chemical-spraying crustacean and its visceral fights for hierarchical advantage. “Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom,” his first chapter concludes.

Family turmoil

When I ring him at 3pm his time, I deal him a real zinger. “How are you?” I ask.

“That’s a complicated question. I’ve some very bad health in my family,” he says in a weak, scratchy voice that is far distant from that of the irritable layer-down of laws with whom I have familiarised ­myself.

“We’re all rather devastated at the moment. My wife is very ill. She’s had two surgeries in the last two months and is suffering from severe complications from the last one, and the prognosis overall is uncertain.”

Peterson and Tammy Roberts knew each other as children growing up on the same street in Fairview, northern Alberta, and have been married for 30 years. This spring she had a rare kidney cancer diagnosed. Surgery determined that the cancer had not spread, but her recovery did not go as planned.

“We got hit by lightning twice, let’s say. It’s not the ideal circumstances to have a positive interview, I’m afraid,” Peterson says.

Although 12 Rules is subtitled An Antidote to Chaos (chaos somewhat unhelpfully being symbolically identified by him as feminine), it is really about human suffering and what to do when, as he puts it in his grimly vivid way, “your leg is clamped firmly in a crocodile’s jaw”.

If anybody knows how to approach suffering, it’s him, I say. “Well, you’d hope so, but this has still thrown us through a massive loop.” At the beginning and at the end of our 90-minute discussion, Peterson’s voice breaks and he sounds close to tears.

Fans and enemies

In the year after its publication in January 2018, 12 Rules sold about three million copies, but Peterson is known by millions more for his podcasts and online lectures. Introduction to the Idea of God has been viewed 4.1 million times on YouTube.

On book tours he attracts audiences of a size more usually enjoyed by stand-up comedians, although his act is short on laughs. He wins ecstatic reviews, many friendly comment pieces and the gratitude of thousands of mainly young men who felt lost.

It is his critics who tend to get noticed, however, invading his lectures, taking him down in print by pointing out his more bizarre utterances and turning interviews into gladiator fights.

The hostility started not with 12 Rules, let alone his previous opus, Maps of Meaning, but with his opposition in 2016 to an amendment to Canadian law that, he claimed, would compel him to refer to transgender students and colleagues by the pronouns of their choice. Academe and other realms in which the latest received wisdom prevail spotted a traitor.

His greatest heresy was to insist on gender being a biological fact, not a social construct. (And I do mean insist. In 12 Rules he writes: “This isn’t a debate. The data are in.”)

What he does not claim is that the average woman is any less intelligent than the average man, and when I ask him to confirm that he believes in the equality of opportunity between the sexes he replies: “You’d have to be a fool not to believe in the equality of opportunity. I mean, it’s not like we have an excess of talent.”

Has he ever called himself a feminist? “I wouldn’t say so, only because of the connotations, let’s say, of the term, but I have a wife and a daughter, and I have a sister and a mother. It’s not like I’m not hyper-concerned about their progress through life and doing everything I possibly can to ensure that they have all the opportunities they possibly can.”

Strange company

He is a suspect public figure for another reason: the company he not so much keeps as is photographed beside. The latest example was a snap of him with an arm around a man wearing an “I’m a proud Islamaphobe (sic)” T-shirt. When this became public in March, Cambridge University rescinded a visiting fellowship for Peterson to study theology there, a decision he calls “extremely unfortunate and shortsighted”.

A number of things are going on here. One is that some pretty weird alt-righters project their prejudices on to him and that Peterson has a mischievous side to him that objects far too little to this. Another is his naivety. He is a clinician and an academic used to rooms of two or lecture halls of 70. Encountering in his 50s (he is 57) the wider world of what passes for thought, he is a little awed by it and a bit unsure how to treat it.

Staring into abyss

I ask if I may make an observation about 12 Rules. Lobsters aside, I mostly agree with the rules, but the picture he paints is of life as a struggle, a battle, even a 70-year war. His prose style is matchingly combative. Even his humour can be violent.

Now “Being”, as he grandly capitalises it, has its sorrows, but I don’t regard it as a constant fight. Have I lived a particularly fortunate life? Or has his been so difficult that it has delivered him to this vision of life red in tooth and claw?

“I think that’s a good question,” he says. “I’ve studied totalitarianism for many decades and I would say that isn’t a study that predisposes you to a particularly rosy view of the world. What did Nietzsche say? If you look too long into an abyss, the abyss looks into you. It’s certainly possible that that’s happened to me to a degree.

“It might also have something to do with my temperament. I have suffered fairly chronically from depression, and you never know how that colours your worldview. It’s certainly made things have a greater impact on me emotionally than they might have.”

I say that from the book I was also struck by how tough his Canadian childhood was, just the weather for one thing. “Well, there’s some truth in that,” he says. “It’s not like I failed to see the beauty also, but, especially in the winters, the absolute harshness of the environment was right at hand, every morning for months.”

In adulthood, ill health encroached early on his young family. His daughter, Mikhaila, suffered severe juvenile arthritis from infancy and had hip and ankle replacements at 17. In January the ankle replacement was redone in Zurich.

“So it has been one hospital trip after another for the last six months.” Like her father, she suffers from depression, apparently ameliorated by eating a beef-only diet, a regimen that her father has adopted to some effect and mockery.

“Do I feel I’ve had a hard life? There’s been some of it that’s been hard,” he says. “It’s by no means been hard compared to many people’s lives, but there’s a strong familial streak of depression that runs through my family.

“That’s been hard. My daughter’s illness was hard, very hard at times. It was very difficult to see her in pain for so long.

“On the other hand, I’ve had great good fortune. I have wonderful children (a son too). I love my wife. I have a great extended family. I’ve had a wonderful career. I’ve had this strange streak of unparalleled success, but I’m distraught currently because of this unexpected occurrence in my family, which is quite devastating to everyone concerned.

“I’m having a difficult time reconciling myself to it, my own good advice notwithstanding. That was a shock and it’s conceivable that I wasn’t in the best psychological state to have received that news because the last three years have been, let’s say, exhausting.”

Behind the armour

The public demands on his time have meant him abandoning his teaching at the University of Toronto and his psychologist’s practice. Nevertheless, over the past three years he has been “terrified” of being “one slip of the tongue away from genuine and permanent trouble” (Rule 10: Be precise in your speech).

What has been “entirely surreal” is not being able to walk down a street unrecognised.

“My mother was here a couple of weeks ago, helping take care of things while my wife was in hospital,” he says. “I was sleeping in the hospital and I would come home and my mother would walk back to the hospital with me, which is only about five blocks away.

“Generally speaking, along the way, five or six people would stop me, sometimes more. This was usually in the morning and they’d tell me some heartfelt story about how they’d married their girlfriend or made peace with their father or quit drinking. They’re very emotional stories and it brought her to tears several times.

“And then the scandals: that adds an additional level of strangeness to it. So much of the scandal has been political, and yet virtually everything I do, certainly in my public lectures, is psychological and philosophical, and very little of it political.

“It’s not like I’m opposed to the left. I understand that people are dispossessed and they need a voice. I’m not a winner-takes-all guy. I know that life has an arbitrary element and that it’s best to set up a society so that people can’t fall too far and not get back up.

“I see a role for the right and the left because the right stands for what’s good about what is and the left gives a voice to those who aren’t served by it.

“The reason I’m a free-speech advocate is because a dialogue has to take place between those two positions in order for us to maintain an even keel.”

He sounds as if he is swallowing back tears. “You caught me at a rather emotional time, I’m afraid. That’s not particularly rare, but, yeah, it’s been rather brutal here.”

It is not the first time he has described himself as an emotional person, but it has been hard to accept the claim because of his adamantine Old Testament public face.

Now I see that facade as an armour that protects him from himself as much as from his enemies. Life’s a battle, but his emotions count among the hostile insurgents. Peterson’s fans will not want to hear this any more than his ­enemies.

Nor can I imagine him accepting what I mean as a compliment. Right now, however, Dr Peterson is nothing like a lobster.

SOURCE 

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If You Can't Beat 'Em, Call 'Em Racist

Trump's tweets about the America-haters did NOT MENTION race

Veteran journalist Brit Hume weighed in on the uproar over President Donald Trump's latest bomb-throwing: "Trump's 'go back' comments simply do not meet the standard definition of racist, a word so recklessly flung around these days that its actual meaning is being lost."

Hume even cited the Merriam-Webster's definition of racism to show that Trump's comments had nothing to do with race. Hilariously — and pathetically, in a sign of the times — Merriam-Webster replied with a lengthy explanation about how "the lexicographer's role" isn't to define "how some may feel [words] should be used," while warning that "it is prudent to recognize that quoting from a dictionary is unlikely to either mollify or persuade the person with whom one is arguing."

In other words, words have no meaning if facts conflict with your triggered feelings.

Trump said what he said poorly, leaving himself wide open for the very assault he's facing. He said what we think he meant far better in defending himself later. "These are people that hate our country," he said. "If you're not happy in the U.S., if you're complaining all the time, very simply, you can leave."

Oddly enough, leaving wasn't his idea. Are we the only ones who remember the scads of leftists pledging to flee America altogether if Trump were elected president? Instead, they're all still here, still hating our country, still undermining the "democracy" they claim to be defending, and still trying to impeach its president.

That brings us to the press conference Monday involving the four radical leftist congresswomen who are members of what has been dubbed "The Squad" — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley.

Omar, the anti-American, anti-Semitic refugee from Somalia — and thus the only one of the four women resembling Trump's original description — was the worst, calling Trump "blatantly racist" and decrying his "agenda of white nationalists." She rehearsed a slew of false charges against Trump. Among them:

Trump was "credibly accused of ... colluding with a foreign government to interfere with our election." (A team of Democrat lawyers spent two years and $35 million to determine that it was NOT a credible accusation.)

He has "pursued an agenda to allow millions of Americans to die from a lack of health care while he transfers millions of dollars in tax cuts to corporations." (Both charges are BIG Lies and/or tinfoil-hat conspiracies. Millions have not died for lack of health care. And no money was "transferred" to corporations because it wasn't taken via taxes in the first place. Democrats are the ones bent on transferring wealth and basing their platform on envy.)

"This is a president who has called black athletes 'sons of b—es.' This is a president that called people who come from black and brown countries 's—tholes.' This is a president who has equated neo-Nazis with those who protest them." (No, he didn't. No, he didn't. And no, he didn't.)

She falsely blamed Trump "for the deaths of children on our border," and she accused him of "committing human-rights abuses" like "keeping children in cages and having human beings drinking out of toilets." (Children and the traffickers who bring them might not be trying to illegally cross the border without Democrats' open invitation. And while no one is drinking from toilets, Border Patrol detention facilities wouldn't be overwhelmed without, again, Democrats' open invitation.)

Omar accused Trump of making a "mockery out of our Constitution," something Democrats do all day every day, while concluding, "It's time for us to impeach this president."

There was plenty more, but that should suffice.

The Democrats' clear agenda with the "racist" charge is a craven political calculation to send Republicans scrambling for cover. It's working, too, as elected Republicans distance themselves from the president while much of the conservative commentariat piles on Trump. But they're succumbing to the relentless drumbeat of the Democrats' Leftmedia super PAC. For example, a Washington Post story today is titled, "White identity politics drives Trump, and the Republican Party under him."

How to put this politely...? That's horse pucky. Buried under Trump's garbled prose is a legitimate point, and it has nothing to do with race. It has to do with loving or hating America and the political party guilty of the latter.

Finally, as we observed yesterday, Trump's strategy is to unite Democrats behind these four radical socialist faces. "Trump doesn't play tic-tac-toe. He plays chess," said Newt Gingrich. "He wants the Democratic Party to identify with" these four women. "Pelosi in a sense was trying to draw a line and say, 'We are not them.' After Trump's tweet, she said, 'Oh, we really are them.'" Pelosi is indeed standing with the four to push a new resolution to condemn Trump.

Likewise, Rush Limbaugh said, "Trump obviously is attempting to have these people become the face of the Democrat Party. It's a brilliant political move." No less than DNC Chief Tom Perez said that of Ocasio-Cortez last year. And a new poll says swing voters do indeed consider AOC to be the "definitional face" of Democrats.

So, we'll see if Trump's strategy really is brilliant.

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 psychology of Trump hate

The Left routinely pour out anger, hated and contempt towards Republican Presidents. The only near-exception was Ronald Reagan.  He was very hard to hate so they mostly settled on contempt for him.  He actually got all his transformative policies through a Democrat Congress!

And a sentimental Christian gentleman -- George Bush II -- was excoriated as a new Hitler!



But Trump has caused the hate to rise to a new level.  The Left have exploded with hate during his Presidency. Even the tiniest thing Trump says or does is fodder for derogatory mention. The thing that symbolizes the Leftist attitude towards Trump for me is the icecream "affair".  At a small White House dinner for some journalists, Trump asked for an extra scoop of icecream with his dessert.  The media went wild!  How contemptible to ask for an extra scoop of icecream!  Who does he think he is?  Oliver Twist or something?  The triviality of it is mind-blowing.



Much wisdom has been written about Trump hatred but I want to take an analysis of it down to the psychological level. I want to relate it to the basics of the Left-Right polarity. And at its psychological fons et origo the Left Right polarity is very simple.  Conservatives are the contented people and Leftists are the discontented people. Conservatives don't think the world is perfect but they can happily live with it. For Leftists, on the other hand, departures from the ideal burn them up.  So how has Trump affected that?

When you are discontented with something you tend to be angry about it and want to change it. So we have the unending stream of mostly addled Leftist proposals for "reform". What the proposals are varies almost from day to day but there is always that simmering discontent motivating them. The problems at the Southern border, for instance, went from non-existent to a humanitarian disaster almost overnight.

The sad thing is that the Left are mostly up against what philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz pointed out a couple of hundred years ago:  Maybe we live in the best of all possible worlds.  Leibnitz didn't mean that seriously.  He set it as a question that should be asked before we change something. The point being that some bad things are necessary to some good things and vice versa.

Current politics have a rather clear example of that.  It would be good and nice and kind if we could abolish America's borders -- as the Left propose -- and thus give all the poor of Latin America access to a better lifestyle.  How good, kind and noble the Left are to propose such a beneficial change!  The bad thing is that we cannot do that and must have defended borders if America is not to be flooded by people with the attitudes, values  and customs that have made their own countries cesspits of violence and corruption.  America already has plenty of troublesome people within its borders.  The last thing it needs is more of them. Opening the borders (good) would lead to a widespread collapse in civility (bad)

So the Left are usually up against it.  The arrangements that have stood the test of time are pretty much the best we can do.  They are an existing balance that maximizes the good without falling too far into the bad.  So any change will usually disrupt that and cause "unforeseen" bad side effects.

The bad effects are not however really "unforeseen.  Conservatives foresee them regularly and warn Leftists about them.  But the Left are so obsessed with the bad things that they see that they close their ears to any information that might distract them from the "good" that they want to do.  So we have things like the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) that made health insurance UNaffordable for many.  Conservatives certainly warned vigorously against it before its enactment and it got not one vote from the Right side of the house.



So the Left are constantly in a state of frustration. The "good" that they try to do almost always rebounds against them and causes them to become unpopular instead of popular -- and loses them votes. Obamacare undoubtedly helped put Trump in office.  Would anybody suddenly hit with $10,000 deductibles vote Democrat?

But the Left have gradually got some of their way over the years,  despite the generally impoverishing effect of their policies. They have, for instance, got America to bow down before the false God of global warming despite the huge and futile cost of windmills, solar panels etc.  Had all that money been spent on repairing and upgrading America's roads, bridges and highways, everybody would have been much better off.

And the Obama/Clinton regime gave them hope of a lot of progress towards their imagined ideal world.  Americans were regulated within an inch of their lives.  The stage was set for the emergence of a new "sustainable" Eden.  Obama had generated much ecstasy and Clinton was clearly committed to continue the march towards that new but elusive Eden where we would all be ants in a great Leftist anthill.  From Hegel on that has been the Leftist vision.

But what they were up against was the wish of many Americans not to be antlike robots obeying every addled command from on high.  The ever-changing enthusiasms of the Left were far from universally shared.  And when Leftists see "racism" under every bed they certainly depart from how most Americans see things.

One thing that has changed little over the years is the Leftist  obsession with race.  Before WWII, they were for the white race, now they are against the white race but they remain racists.  With "affirmative action" and "diversity" it is all about race for them.  Almost comically, however, they deny being racists and constantly accuse everybody else of being racists. They explain their race consciousness as an attempt to do good so, in their simplistic way, any other thinking about racial differences is bad.

And they extend their intolerance of any groupthink other than their own to all sorts of groupthink by others.  In particular they are very wary of patriotism and the idea that America is particularly admirable or exceptional.

Obama put it politely when he said during an April 2009 press conference: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism”.  Coming from an American President that is remarkable. Most Americans love their country or are at least proud of it and expect to hear that echoed in the words of their President.  Obama could on occasions bring himself to praise American ideals but praise for America as such was in short supply.



The above picture was from a 2007 political rally where the national anthem was being played. An ABC News video showed that Senator Obama did not salute at any time during the anthem and that everybody else on the platform did.  His ignoring of the anthem was widely criticized so he learned from that and was  more careful when he became President.  But it is clear that his heart was just not in it.

Obama was noted for his politeness but most Leftists are not polite at all about any praise for America.  They call it "racism".  Leftist Howard Zinn's widely used textbook A People's History of the United States is a catalog of America's failings, real, exaggerated and imagined. As America is a famously patriotic country, Leftists do at election times make some pretence of patriotism but the frequency with which they prescribe Zinn's textbook for the schools they control shows what they really think.

It is clear enough why anybody would be careful about racism.  It is "good" to avoid excesses such as Hitler's  -- but extending "racism" to include all forms of group consciousness is egregious.

So by the time of the election that brought Trump to power, many Americans had grown very tired of being lectured to and restricted by the Left.  What to the Left were the first steps towards a new Eden were to many Americans an attempt to make them into something other than what they naturally were -- and they were in a mood to rebel against it.  And in particular they disliked the constant parade of accusations and condemnations about how "deplorable" America and Americans were.

So the election of Trump was to his followers a return to normal -- a return to how they naturally felt and thought.  They simply threw off the ever-tightening Leftist straitjacket that was trying to force them to be something that they were not.  And because of their natural patriotic feelings they LOVED the man who liberated them to express that loudly and proudly again.

So now we can see why the Left hate Trump beyond all bounds. All their attempts to right the wrongs of the world as they see them have always failed. The Soviet attempt took a painfully long time to fail but it too in the end failed.  But through their "long march" through American institutions it had begun to look as if  they might now be building a lasting approach to a new Eden.  And the Obama presidency seemed to be a culmination of that --bringing a clear victory to them at last.  After lifetimes of failures they finally seemed to be getting there. Their dreams were on the brink of being realized.

Then Donald Trump took it all away.  He destroyed their last great hope of permanent "reform". He liberated people to be what they wanted to be rather than what the Left wanted them to be.  And from the moment he became the Republican candidate his vigorous patriotism signalled that.  He was clearly from the world that Leftists deplored. And almost as soon as he came to power he did the unthinkable by removing America's obeisance to global warming -- by withdrawing from the Paris "treaty".  The "treaty" was mostly just an empty gesture but Trump took even that away.

Thanks to the traitorous John McCain, Trump did not manage to get  Obamacare abolished but he broke its backbone by getting the mandatory levy abolished. Obamacare ended up as no triumph anyway, as we see from the way that most of the current crop of Democrat presidential candidates are pushing "Medicare for all".  So there is nothing left for the Left.  What should have been their great triumph lies as a shattered ruin at their feet.

So if someone had destroyed all your dreams just when your dreams seemed likely to be realized, would you not hate with a passion the man who snatched those dreams away?  The Left are great haters so after what he took away from them, they hate Trump with all their  being. Nothing that he does is forgiveable -- JR.

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Senator: ‘I Stand with’ Trump; ‘Montanans Are Sick and Tired of Listening to…Radical Democrats Trash Our Country’

The citizens of his state are “sick and tired” of hearing Democrats attack America and its founding principles, Republican Montana Senator Steve Daines declared Monday.

On Monday, Sen. Daines took to Twitter to voice his support of President Donald Trump:

“Montanans are sick and tired of listening to anti-American, anti-Semite, radical Democrats trash our country and our ideals. This is America. We’re the greatest country in the world.

“I stand with @realdonaldtrump”

On Sunday, Trump sparked controversy when he attacked “’Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen” for espousing policies “from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.”

SOURCE 

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Jesse Watters: Dems Call Trump ‘A Nazi Rapist,’ But Cry Their Eyes Out When He Says, ‘Go Home’

Democrats complaining about President Donald Trump’s tweets can dish it out, but they can’t take it, Fox News’ “The Five” Co-host Jesse Watters said Monday.

“When did ‘Love it or leave it’ become racist?” Watters asked, dismissing Trump’s Sunday tweet that progressive Democrat congresswomen who hate America should move to the socialist countries they so admire. Trump even invited them to return to the U.S. once they’ve proven their policies work, Watters noted:

“These were not racist [comments]. This about patriotism. When did ‘Love it or leave it’ become racist?

“Not only leave it, but ‘Hey, come back and help us fix our problems.’ This country is so sensitive now. We are not talking about death, famine, drought, or anything. We are talking about a word, a tweet. We’re not even talking about an action and people are crying their eyes out about this.”

Watters went on to say that Democrats have said many worse things about Trump than he has said about them – and, yet, freak out over his words in order to avoid having a debate on real issues:

“They have said so many worse things about this president: ‘He is a Nazi rapist who deserves to be in prison for the rest of his life.’

“He says, ‘Go home’ and they say, ‘Oh, my God, this is the biggest scandal since Watergate.’”

“These people are so bereft of actual ideas they create this thing because they’ve deceived the rest of the country as to actually what he said. He says this to everybody - of all stripes and of all genders, of all parties: Romney, Rosie, Don Lemon, Maxine, McCabe.

“Everyone gets it a little bit below the belt and every time he does it everyone acts shocked like we haven’t been watching this for three years, and instead of fighting back on the substance, they cry and they pout and they look soft and they look weak.”

SOURCE 

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Trump moves to lessen the pain of a tax beloved by the Left: capital gains taxes

Australia abolished its capital gains tax long ago

It’s official. President Trump wants to index capital gains taxes for inflation. This would be a big stimulus boost for the U.S. economy immediately and over time and could get us back to 3 percent to 4 percent growth by liberating potentially hundreds of billions of dollars for new capital investment. My sources tell me that the president has told his White House team that if he can get his legal counsel to give him a ruling that he has the right to make this change administratively, he will do exactly that.

I’m not a lawyer, so I won’t weigh in on whether the White House has the authority to define what constitutes a capital “gain” on a stock or a property. Traditionally, a gain has been defined as the difference between the price that an asset has been bought at and the price it is sold at. The issue is whether these gains should be adjusted for the inflation rate over the time period the asset was owned. In other words, should the gain be defined as the change in the cost of living over the period.

If you bought a stock 10 years ago for $1,000 and over that time the inflation rate was, say 20 percent, if you sold it for $1,200 is that $200 a genuine gain to the shareholder?

In an ideal world, Congress would define a gain over for an asset held over a long period of time as taking into account inflation. This would reward risk taking and capital investment by reducing the “real” capital gains tax. It would also induce more shareholders to sell stocks in old assets and companies like Macy’s and buy into shares of new-age companies that will be the wealth and job creators of the future. I suspect most Americans would think that would be a fair treatment.

By the way, Congress wants to give itself a cost-of-living raise each year, a measure supported by such leading liberals as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Why not a similar deal for those 100 million Americans or so who own stocks?

Even Democratic Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer of New York has in the past spoken out in favor of killing this inflation penalty. He once said on the House floor “If we really want to increase growth, there are proposals that we can do. I would be for indexing all capital gains and savings and borrowing.” As leader of the new left-wing Democratic Party, he is now against this after he was for it.

Stock ownership has been treated roughly in the tax code over the past decade. Under President George W. Bush, the tax was lowered to 15 percent. But under President Obama, the rate rose almost 60 percent, to 23.8 percent — thanks in part to an Obamacare tax increase. This rate is higher than even at the end of Clinton era.

It is also one of the few tax rates Mr. Trump has failed to cut to promote a stronger economy. A run at reducing the Obamacare capital gains penalty was killed in the Senate because of class warfare arguments.

The left says that investors are not very sensitive to the capital gains tax rate. Len Burman, an economist at the Brookings Institution, says that the rate of tax has not had much impact on the buying and selling of stocks. But the evidence of the last 40 years tends to refute that.

After the capital gains tax increase in 1986 from 20 percent to 28 percent, capital gains revenues actually fell from $44 billion a year to $27 billion a year by 1991 because fewer people sold stock at the higher tax rate. After Bill Clinton cut the capital gains tax back down to 20 percent again, capital gains revenues surged from $54 billion in 1996 to $99 billion in 1999. The rich actually paid more tax with the lower rates.

No one knows for sure how much unrealized capital gains that would be sold if indexing were adopted as federal tax policy. In the short term, this could mean hundreds of billions of dollars of sales of stock and then tens of billions of dollars of tax revenues collected by the government.

Without indexing, some of this revenue would never be collected because shareholders often hold onto stock until death and pass it on to their heirs tax free. Some of the stocks would be put in charitable foundations where tax on the gains is never paid. So the liberal charge that this policy would be a tax give-away to the rich is highly exaggerated.

History also shows that the capital gains tax — all other things equal — is inversely related to venture capital funding for start-up firms. A low capital gains tax attracts dollars to higher-risk investments. What’s wrong with a nice boost for the women and men who start new companies in America?

The lawyers at the Treasury Department and the Office of Legal Counsel will determine whether indexing can and should be done with a stroke of the pen by President Trump. But as an economic matter, this tax change would be a home run crashing off the centerfield score board.

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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Trump: 'You Can't Say You Love Our Country If You Want to Destroy It Through Open Borders'

President Donald Trump, speaking at a rally in Greenville, N.C. on Wednesday night, defended legal immigrants and questioned whether those who push for open borders can really love the United States of America.

"All American citizens, including millions and millions of legal immigrants who work hard to come into our country, who study, who wait on line, sometimes for ten years, and who respect our laws and followed the rules, they deserve a government that is loyal to them. They work hard," Trump said.

"You can't say you love our country if you want to destroy it through open borders. Open borders are a disaster," he said.

"Democrats have put the needs of foreign citizens far ahead of our own citizens," President Donald Trump told a rally in Greenville, N.C. Wednesday night.

“Nowhere in this world is there anything like what's happening with immigration, how bad it is. The Democrats' open-border policies deplete our public services, overcrowd our schools and hospitals, and bring crime, drugs and deadly gangs into our community.

“The Democrats want to spend more money on health care for an illegal immigrant, more than they do for a citizen of the United States,” he said.

Trump decried the violence of gangs such as MS-13, and he criticized Democrats for doing nothing about the worsening problem of human trafficking at the border.

He noted that five years ago, Democrats supported the idea of a border wall, but now they don't. "You know why?" he asked. "For political reasons," he said.

Trump mentioned that Nancy Pelosi's "sanctuary" state of California recently approved $100 million to take care of illegal immigrants. "And then you look on the sidewalks of Los Angeles, the sidewalks of San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi's district, nobody's ever seen anything like it in the history of our country, what's happening there."

Trump noted that the recent arrest of 22 MS-13 gang members took place in sanctuary city of Los Angeles. Nineteen of the 22 were in the country illegally, he said.

"Every nation has the right to establish and enforce immigration laws in its own interest. It's common sense. It's so simple. And the voters understand it. We expect that that those who seek to join our society will obey our laws, revere our Constitution, cherish our history, support themselves financially, and embrace our American values and love our American flag. (The crowd cheered.)

"We believe in an immigration system based on merit -- merit where they come in. We have so many companies coming in --- automobile companies, companies of all types, and we need workers. We actually need workers. We have the lowest unemployment rate that we've had in 51 years -- soon it'll be the lowest ever.

“”But they have to come in where they can help our country. They have to come in based on merit. And we're putting in bills, and let's see what happens,” Trump said. “Otherwise we'll just wait ‘til we win back the House, win the Senate, win the presidency, and we'll vote.”

SOURCE 

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Meet the Candidate Who Will Challenge AOC

Looks like she is half Asian and half African.  That should be worth a few votes in itself

Scherie Murray, a New York Republican, has just announced her intention to run for the congressional seat now occupied by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In her first television interview, Murray told Fox News's Sean Hannity she believes that AOC, caught up in the "limelight," has neglected issues of importance to New York's 14th congressional district:

I think the narrative on the national level needs to be dialed back. And that is why I am in the race. I'd like to represent the constituents in Queens and the Bronx. And we see AOC as from the time she's been elected, she put out a policy like the job killing green new deal.

She then went on to kill the Amazon deal in New York, which would have put some 25,000 jobs in queens. And so these are some of the reasons, along with kitchen table issues, that I do believe that AOC has neglected, in her limelight bid, to focus on in the congressional district.

Murray said she wants to start talking about "issues that are important to the constituents of the 14th congressional district."

She mentioned infrastructure -- the crumbling subway system and roads in need of repair. "We need to really tackle our education system -- the diversity in New York, the education system. We really need to start talking about policy that's going to connect with the everyday American.”

Asked how she feels about President Donald Trump, Murray said:

“Well, I migrated here from Jamaica. I know firsthand what it is not just to be an immigrant, but to go through the process, right, and what do I think about what the president is doing? I think that the president is delivering on his promises when he got elected.”

Murray also took her campaign to Twitter on Wednesday, writing:

There’s a crisis in Queens and it’s called AOC. She isn’t worried about us - she’s worried about being famous. That’s why I’m running for Congress.

Murray also tweeted:

I‘m a Jamaican immigrant. And I love America. Not the America radical socialists want to see, but the America that is a land of opportunity for all. That’s what I’m fighting for.

SOURCE 

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The cold war against America by the Left

Could it become a hot war?  The hatred is strong enough

The summer season has ripped off the thin scab that covered an American wound, revealing a festering disagreement about the nature and origins of the United States.

The San Francisco Board of Education recently voted to paint over, and thus destroy, a 1,600-square-foot mural of George Washington’s life in San Francisco’s George Washington High School.

Victor Arnautoff, a communist Russian-American artist and Stanford University art professor, had painted “Life of Washington” in 1936, commissioned by the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. A community task force appointed by the school district had recommended that the board address student and parent objections to the 83-year-old mural, which some viewed as racist for its depiction of black slaves and Native Americans.

Nike pitchman and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick recently objected to the company’s release of a special Fourth of July sneaker emblazoned with a 13-star Betsy Ross flag. The terrified Nike immediately pulled the shoe off the market.

The New York Times opinion team issued a Fourth of July video about “the myth of America as the greatest nation on earth.” The Times’ journalists conceded that the United States is “just OK.”

During a recent speech to students at a Minnesota high school, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) offered a scathing appraisal of her adopted country, which she depicted as a disappointment whose racism and inequality did not meet her expectations as an idealistic refugee. Omar’s family had fled worn-torn Somalia and spent four-years in a Kenyan refugee camp before reaching Minnesota, where Omar received a subsidized education and ended up a congresswoman.

The U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team won the World Cup earlier this month. Team stalwart Megan Rapinoe refused to put her hand over heart during the playing of the national anthem, boasted that she would never visit the “f—ing White House” and, with others, nonchalantly let the American flag fall to the ground during the victory celebration.

The city council in St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis, voted to stop reciting the Pledge of Allegiance before its meeting on the rationale that it wished not to offend a “diverse community.”

The list of these public pushbacks at traditional American patriotic customs and rituals could be multiplied. They follow the recent frequent toppling of statues of 19th-century American figures, many of them from the South, and the renaming of streets and buildings to blot out mention of famous men and women from the past now deemed illiberal enemies of the people.

Such theater is the street version of what candidates in the Democratic presidential primary have been saying for months. They want to disband border enforcement, issue blanket amnesties, demand reparations for descendants of slaves, issue formal apologies to groups perceived to be the subjects of discrimination, and rail against American unfairness, inequality, and a racist and sexist past.

In their radical progressive view — shared by billionaires from Silicon Valley, recent immigrants and the new Democratic Party — America was flawed, perhaps fatally, at its origins. Things have not gotten much better in the country’s subsequent 243 years, nor will they get any better — at least not until America as we know it is dismantled and replaced by a new nation predicated on race, class and gender identity-politics agendas.

In this view, an “OK” America is no better than other countries. As Barack Obama once bluntly put it, America is only exceptional in relative terms, given that citizens of Greece and the United Kingdom believe their own countries are just as exceptional. In other words, there is no absolute standard to judge a nation’s excellence.

About half the country disagrees. It insists that America’s sins, past and present, are those of mankind. But only in America were human failings constantly critiqued and addressed.

America does not have be perfect to be good. As the world’s wealthiest democracy, it certainly has given people from all over the world greater security and affluence than any other nation in history — with the largest economy, largest military, greatest energy production and most top-ranked universities in the world.

America alone kept the postwar peace and still preserves free and safe global communications, travel and commerce.

The traditionalists see American history as a unique effort to overcome human weakness, bias and sin. That effort is unmatched by other cultures and nations, and explains why millions of foreign nationals swarm into the United States, both legally and illegally.

These arguments over our past are really over the present — and especially the future.

If progressives and socialists can at last convince the American public that their country was always hopelessly flawed, they can gain power to remake it based on their own interests. These elites see Americans not as unique individuals but as race, class and gender collectives, with shared grievances from the past that must be paid out in the present and the future.

We’ve seen something like this fight before, in 1861 — and it didn’t end well.

SOURCE 

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PROF: Big Tech moved ‘rock bottom minimum’ of 2.6 million votes to Hillary in 2016

A liberal professor and “very strong public supporter of Hillary Clinton” is raising the alarms about Google manipulation of millions of unwitting voters in recent elections, as well as the potential impact for 2020.

Dr. Robert Epstein, former editor of Psychology Today and acclaimed psychologist who founded the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, discussed his research before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, and his testimony was mind-boggling.

“You testified before this committee that Google’s manipulation of votes gave at least 2.6 million additional votes to Hillary Clinton in the year 2016. Is that correct?” Sen. Ted Cruz questioned in a video of the hearing published by Breitbart.

“That’s correct,” Epstein said.

“I want to make sure I understand. You personally supported and voted for Hillary Clinton?” Cruz pressed.

“I was a very strong public supporter of Hillary Clinton, yes,” Epstein said.

“So you’re not dismayed that people voted for her, your testimony is that Google is through bias in search results manipulating voters in a way that they’re not aware of,” Cruz questioned.

“On a massive scale,” Epstein said, “and what I’m saying is that I believe in Democracy, I believe in the free and fair election, more than I have any kind of allegiance to a candidate or a party.”

Epstein testified that the influence of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Big Tech’s manipulation could sway as many as 15 million votes in 2020, if the companies are all pulling for the same candidate.

“In 2020, if all these companies are supporting the same candidate there’s 15 million votes on the line that can be shifted without people’s knowledge and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace,” he said.

Epstein gave some examples of how Google, Facebook and other companies herded certain voters to the polls through voting reminders and total control over search results, quick-answer results, and other features essentially amounts to mind control.

“In 2016, if Mark Zuckerberg for example had chosen to send out a go vote reminder, say just to Democrats, and no one would have known if he had done this, that would have given that day at least an additional 450,000 votes to Democrats and we know this without doubt because of Facebook’s own published data cause they did an experiment that they didn’t tell anyone about during the 2010 election,” he said.

“They published it in 2012. It had 60 million Facebook users involved. They sent out a go vote reminder and they got something like 360,000 more people to get off their sofas and go vote who otherwise would have stayed home,” Epstein said. “Without monitoring systems in place we’ll never know …”

“Twenty-eighteen, I’m sure they were more aggressive. We’ve got lots of data to suggest that, and in 2020, you can bet that all of these companies are going to go all out. And the methods that they’re using are invisible, they’re subliminal, they’re more powerful than most any effects I’ve ever seen in the behavioral sciences and I’ve been in the behavioral sciences for almost 40 years,” he said.

Cruz repeatedly attempted to summarize the situation and put the voter manipulation into plain terms, and Epstein repeatedly corrected Cruz to explain that the issue is likely far worse than the senator from Texas was describing.

“What you are testifying to is that a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires and giant corporations are able to spend millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars collectively, massively influencing the results of elections, and there’s no accountability,” Cruz said. “You said we don’t know, we have no way of knowing if Google or Facebook or Twitter sends to Democrats or Republicans or how they bias it because it’s a black box with no transparency or accountability whatsoever.

“Am I understanding you correctly?” Cruz questioned.

“Senator, with respect, I must correct you,” Epstein replied. “If Mark Zuckerberg chooses to send out a go vote reminder just to Democrats on Election Day, that doesn’t cost him a dime.”

“Fair enough,” Cruz said. “Do you happen to know who the Hillary Clinton campaign’s number one financial supporter was in the year 2016?”

“I think I do, but please remind me,” Epstein said.

“The number one financial supporter of the Hillary Clinton campaign in the 2016 election was the parent company of Google, Alphabet, … and your testimony is through their deceptive search methods they moved 2.6 million votes in her direction,” Cruz said.

“I would think anybody, whether or not you favor one candidate or another, should be deeply dismayed about a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires having that much power over our elections to silently and deceptively shift vote outcomes,” he said.

“Again, with respect, I must correct you,” Epstein said. “The 2.6 million is a rock bottom minimum. The range is between 2.6 and 10.4 million, depending on how aggressively they’ve used the techniques that I’ve been studying now for six and a half years … such as the search engine manipulation effect, the search suggestion effect, the answer bot effect and a number of others.

“They control these and no one can counteract them. These are not competitive. These are tools that they have at their disposal exclusively,” he said.

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 Race Card Has Gone Bust

America has never been fairer or more integrated, yet politicians obsess over wiping out discrimination

In William Julius Wilson’s 1978 book, “The Declining Significance of Race,” the sociologist argued that racial discrimination was no longer the biggest barrier to black economic advancement. His fellow liberals were outraged. Forty-one years later, Mr. Wilson is still right and the political left is still in denial.

Accusations of white racism are all the rage in Washington these days. If you oppose school busing, you’re a racist. If you want immigration laws enforced, you’re a racist. If you’re against slavery reparations or support adding a citizenship question to the census or criticize minority members of Congress, you’re a racist.

One problem is that Donald Trump has adopted the kind of identity politics we usually associate with Democrats. Another is that Democratic presidential contestants in search of black votes have taken racial pandering to new lows. Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., spoke for many of the candidates when he told National Public Radio last week that “white America” needs to come to grips with what he says explains today’s racial inequities. Namely, the “systemic racism all around us. It’s the air we breathe.”

Mr. Wilson’s observations about discrimination and black progress four decades ago weren’t novel—conservative scholars like Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell already had been making similar points—but they were striking coming from a liberal academic. Mr. Wilson did not deny the roles that slavery and Jim Crow played in perpetuating disparities. Nevertheless, he wrote, “they do not provide a meaningful explanation of the life chances of black Americans today.” Mayor Pete has been wrong for longer than he’s been alive.

No reasonable person denies that racists still live among us or that racial discrimination can retard upward mobility. Still, evidence of racial bias in the past or the present is not proof that racism is responsible for current social disparities. After all, the pathologies we see in low-income black communities aren’t confined to those communities. As Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam wrote in 2017, “The white working-class family is today more fragile than the black family was at the time of the famous alarm-sounding 1965 ‘Report on the Negro Family’ by Daniel Patrick Moynihan.”

Liberals who insist that racial discrimination largely explains the black-white wealth gap are ignoring other plausible explanations. Black poverty and employment today, for example, seem to be more a function of family formation than of white racism. For more than 20 years, black married couples have had poverty rates in the single digits, and black married men have had a higher labor-force participation rate than white men who never married. According to The Wall Street Journal, last year the labor-force participation gap between blacks and whites virtually vanished, the first time that’s happened since 1972. Systemic racism may be “in the air we breathe,” but black unemployment rates are at generational lows.

“Family instability and fatherlessness collide with racial and economic disadvantage to create a negative feedback loop in black communities, hampering children’s potential and perpetuating racial inequality,” writes Kay Hymowitz in a recent City Journal essay. Citing new research by John Iceland, a demographer at Penn State University, she notes that “differences in family structure are the most significant variable in explaining the black-white affluence gap. In fact, its importance has grown over time relative to other explanations, including discrimination. Unable to pool earnings with a spouse, to take advantage of economies of scale, and to share child care, black single parents have a tougher time than their married counterparts building a nest egg.”

Government programs are no substitute for the development of human capital. If wealth-redistribution schemes lifted people out of poverty, we would have closed these gaps a long time ago. Liberal politicians and activists have little interest in addressing the ways in which black behavioral choices impact inequality. It’s easier to turn out voters and raise money by equating racial imbalances with racial bias and smearing political opponents who disagree.

Will it work in the end? It didn’t for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Telling people what you think they want to hear can be easier than telling the truth, but you also risk insulting them. And blaming bad outcomes among blacks on the malevolence of others is not only wrong but insulting to Americans of every race. This isn’t 1950. Attitudes have changed. Behaviors have changed. American neighborhoods and schools and marriages are more integrated. We elected a black president twice, and he won several of the nation’s whitest states both times. Racism has probably never been less significant in America, and blacks have never had more opportunities to seize. Liberals are pushing a narrative that many white voters don’t recognize and that many black voters know is false.

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Democrats Say No One Is Above the Law — Except Illegal Immigrants
   
We have heard a lot about the importance of the rule of law from Democrats lately. During special counsel Robert Muller’s investigation of President Trump, Democrats in Congress delivered a clear and unified message.

“No one is above the law, especially the president of the United States,” declared House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “Donald Trump is the most corrupt president in our lifetime. … No one is above the law. Not even the president,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. “Everyone should be held accountable. And the president is not above the law,” said Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif. Republicans “are basically saying that in America one man is above the law and that’s not a fact,” said Senate Minority Whip Richard Durbin, D-Ill. “No one is above the law [and] everybody ought to be held accountable,” said South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

No one, that is, except illegal immigrants.

Fast-forward to this past weekend, when the Trump administration announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers would soon begin enforcement actions to remove illegal immigrants who have been issued final deportation orders by a federal judge. Those same Democrats and the rest of their party delivered a clear and unified message.

“It’s so appalling, it’s outside the circle of civilized human behavior,” said Pelosi. “The Trump administration’s cruelty runs bone-deep. A Warren administration will not rip families apart to try and score political points,” said Warren. “The aim is to scare immigrant communities. … And so, he’s going to … do these raids which is a crime against humanity,” said Harris. “We are on your side, we stand with you together,” Durbin told activists protesting ICE enforcement. “It’s really designed to strike fear into people at a moment when fear is something we’ve got way too much of in this country,” said Buttigieg.

So, Democrats were for rule of law when it comes to the Mueller probe, which did not find that the president broke the law. But they are against rule of law when it comes to illegal immigrants who have been found by a federal judge to be in violation of U.S. immigration law.

Illegal immigrants subject to ICE enforcement have been given their constitutional right to due process, with the right to a hearing in a federal immigration court and the right to be represented by counsel. If they show up at their hearing and are not granted relief by an immigration judge, they have the right to appeal. If they lose that appeal, they are issued a final order of removal. Once such an order is issued, they must either voluntarily depart the country or turn themselves in to an ICE facility for deportation. If they fail to depart or turn themselves in, then their case is referred to the ICE fugitive unit, which is tasked with finding them.

It is a long process to get to the point where ICE is knocking on someone’s door to enforce a final order of removal. Those now subject to a final deportation order either failed to show up to immigration court; showed up and lost their case; waived their right to appeal; lost their appeal; did not show up for their appeal hearing; were granted voluntary departure but did not leave; or failed to turn themselves in to ICE for court-ordered removal. In each case, a federal judge has ruled that they do not have the right to be in the United States and must leave. But Democratic leaders are now saying they should be allowed to stay, in contravention of our immigration laws.

Then again, Democrats didn’t think this way when they held the White House. President Barack Obama deported far more illegal immigrants than Trump. Axios reports that “under the Obama administration, total ICE deportations were above 385,000 each year in fiscal years 2009-2011, and hit a high of 409,849 in fiscal 2012.” I don’t recall Democrats in Congress accusing Obama of a “crime against humanity” or actions “outside the circle of civilized human behavior.”

Back then, Democrats agreed, as Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., put it in a 2009 speech, that “illegal immigration is wrong, plain and simple.” Since Trump took office, Democrats have become the party of illegal immigration. The want to decriminalize illegal border crossings, cut ICE detention beds to force the agency to release illegal immigrants and then refuse to enforce lawful deportation orders. So, it’s a little hard to take Democrats seriously when, in investigating Trump, they claim to be fighting for the principle that no one is above the law.

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Crowd Chants “Send Her Back” At Trump Rally As President Targets Ilhan Omar

Supporters of President Trump chanted, “Send her back!” as Trump read a litany of soft on Islamist terror, anti-American comments by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) at a campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina Wednesday night.

Omar came to the United States via a refugee camp in Kenya when she was a child, having escaped from her native Somalia with her family during a civil war. Omar became a U.S. citizen in 2000, was elected to the Minnesota House in 2016 and the U.S. House in 2018. Omar has made a name for herself as the first hijab wearing Congressman and by her anti-Semitic, soft on Islamist terror and anti-American comments.

Omar is one of four radical anti-American freshmen Democrats in the House of Representatives known as “the Squad”. The others being Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Rep. Ayanna Pressley (MA) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (MI). Trump is tying the mainstream of the Democratic Party with the extremist Squad members.

Trump did not comment or react as the crowd chanted, “Send her back!” for about fifteen seconds. He resumed his prepared remarks with more criticism of Omar’s statements.

A protester interrupted Trump as he first mentioned Omar, which fired up the crowd as he was removed by security.

SOURCE 

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Republican Support For Trump Rises 5 Points Following ‘Go Back’ Tweets

Republican support for President Trump has increased 5 points since he suggested a group of minority progressive lawmakers “go back” where they came from, a Reuters–Ipsos poll finds.

The president’s net approval among Republicans now stands at 72 percent after he tweeted Sunday that the four lawmakers — thought to be Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) — should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” the poll shows.

Trump’s support faltered among Democrats and independents, however. His net approval dropped 2 percentage points among Democrats, pollsters found, while about 3 in 10 independent voters now say they approve of Trump, down from 4 in 10 last week.

According to the poll, the president’s overall approval did not change over the past week, despite the attacks against the lawmakers — all of whom are U.S. citizens — which have spurred widespread bipartisan backlash.

Trump has continued to insist that the tweets were not racist and that “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.”

GOP congressional leadership has denied that the tweets and the president are racist, and only four House Republicans voted in favor of the Democratic-led resolution.

The nationwide survey was conducted on Monday and Tuesday and surveyed 1,113 adults, including 478 Democrats and 406 Republicans. It has a credibility interval of 3 percentage points.

SOURCE 

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Google Exec Refuses to Commit to Independent Audit of Its Moderation Practices

Google and its subsidiary YouTube are constructed, operated and maintained through algorithms to be "politically neutral," a company executive told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Tuesday.

But some lawmakers scoffed. What about Google’s censorship in China? Republican Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) asked Karan Bhatia, Google’s vice president of global government affairs and public policy.

“Why would anybody believe you now when you say we don't ever impose an ideological agenda?” Hawley asked the Google executive.

But Bhatia refused to commit to an independent, third-party audit of Google’s moderation practices, much to Hawley’s disgust. “So sad,” Hawley said.

At the start of his questioning, Hawley asked Bhatia, “You don't impose filters based on political viewpoints, that's your testimony, right?"

"It is both contrary to our mission, contrary to our business interests and it would be incompatible to the systems that we build to work political bias in there, which I think is why we've has third-party studies, including the ones that I've referenced, that demonstrate that we do not have political bias," Bhatia replied.

Bhatia agreed with Hawley that injecting political bias would be "inconsistent with our values."

"Except when you do it in China," Hawley shot back. "Right? You're happy to censor for the repressive authoritarian Chinese regime, like for instance with Google.cn, happy to censor away any mention of Tiananmen Square, happy to help the Chinese government maintain control of all information within the country, happy to help them control the information flow to their own citizens. You're happy to do all of that. Would you call that censorship with an ideological agenda?" Hawley asked.

Bhatia did not give a direct answer. Instead, he noted that Google does not offer "almost any” products in China. He said Google exited China in 2010 because “we felt that the censorship requirements thata were being applied Google were not compatible with the products that we were able to offer.”

But Google.cn did include censorship tools, Hawley noted. "Are you willing to commit today, here, that Google will not agree to participate in any form of censorship with the Chinese regime … against Chinese citizens? Will you commit to that?” Hawley asked. “You will not agree to…restrictions on data flow in China, the Chinese market?”

Bhatia dodged the question, saying he couldn't imagine what Hawley was referencing.

"So you won't block search terms for Uighurs or concentration camps or Tiananmen Square -- you won't do that in any venture going forward?” Hawley asked.

"We -- we don't,"-- Bhatia started to say.

"No, I'm not asking that," Hawley interrupted. "I'm asking if you won't -- because we know you have in the past. That's what Google.cn was.

"You know, you've contemplated it with Project Dragonfly," Hawley continued. "I'm asking you now for a commitment. I'm glad to hear you say that Project Dragonfly's been canceled. I think that's news. So that's good to hear, because there have been news reports that it's still active."

Bhatia told Hawley, "We have no current plans to go into China in the search market."

"So that's great," Hawley said. "And you're committing to me here today that you will not in the future do so, and you will not engage in censorship in China?" Hawley asked for a yes or no answer, but he didn't get one:

"What we're willing to commit to, Senator, is that any decision to ever look at going back into the China search market is one that we would take only in consultation with key stakeholders," Bhatia said.

Hawley was not pleased with Bhatia's responses.

“Well, what I'm looking for is a little honesty, and what I'm also looking for is some accountability," Hawley said

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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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New Asylum Rule Is Meant to Save Lives

The new immigration rule relies on the fact that the only way the border crossers can be given legal residence is if they are refugees. The new rule says that claimants for refugee status must show that they really are refugees and not just economic migrants.  It should shut out all central American illegals -- as they have almost all come via Mexico -- which does offer refuge to them. That means that they have no need to come to the USA to find refuge. So they are motivated by economics, not danger.  They are not refugees

On Monday, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security announced a new rule regarding U.S. asylum laws. This comes in the wake of massive numbers of foreign migrants exploiting America's asylum system as a means of de facto immigration. It comes also as Democrats in Congress have been steadfast in opposing any legislative solution to the border crisis, as the party has essentially adopted an open-borders policy.

The new rule would bar foreign nationals from receiving asylum in the U.S. if they have not first applied for asylum in an intermediary country, which in many current cases would be Mexico or another Central American country.

In announcing the new rule, Attorney General William Barr noted that the administration's intention is to uphold the spirit of America's asylum system. "The United States is a generous country but is being completely overwhelmed by the burdens associated with apprehending and processing hundreds of thousands of aliens along the southern border," he said.

"This Rule will decrease forum shopping by economic migrants and those who seek to exploit our asylum system to obtain entry to the United States — while ensuring that no one is removed from the United States who is more likely than not to be tortured or persecuted on account of a protected ground."

Predictably, leftist groups were quick to decry the new rule as "most egregious" and "extreme," with Charanya Krishnaswami, advocacy director for the Americas at Amnesty International, claiming that it would "fundamentally eviscerate the right to territorial asylum in the United States." Several groups vowed to take the Trump administration to court, the irony of which was seemingly lost on these migrant-advocate groups.

We relayed the heart-wrenching story last month of the drowning death of a migrant and his two-year-old child. Because of the father's impatience with America's asylum system, he chose to break the law and try to illegally cross into the U.S. — a decision that tragically ended up costing him and his child their lives. The new rule is aimed and decreasing deadly incidents like this by eliminating another pull factor.

SOURCE 

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a rising star — but her popularity is also fuelling Donald Trump/b>

She is young, bold and outspoken - and should be Donald Trump’s worst nightmare. But this vocal critic is only helping the President.

She's quickly rising as one of the brightest stars of the Democrat Party, but who is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a rising star in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party — bold, outspoken and hugely popular on social media.

But the millennial congresswoman is reportedly sparking concerns among some top Democrats, with fears her defining presence could lose the party crucial swinging voters at the 2020 election.

The issue has come to a head this week, with Ms Ocasio-Cortez at the centre of a Twitter spat with US President Donald Trump.

And while his comments were officially condemned as racist by the House of Representatives, the latest spat could be actually helping Mr Trump win the 2020 election.

It started when in a series of tweets, the US President suggested the new generation of Democrats who have been feuding with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should “go back” to their countries to fix their governments, saying “you can’t leave fast enough”.

When his tweets were labelled racist, Mr Trump insisted on Tuesday that his tweets suggesting the four Democratic congresswomen of colour return to their countries “were NOT Racist,” and he appealed to fellow Republicans to “not show weakness” and to resist a house resolution condemning his words.

“I don’t have a Racist bone in my body!” Mr Trump exclaimed on Twitter, a day after declaring that “many people agree” with his assessment of the four freshman politicians.

“Those tweets were NOT Racist,” Mr Trump wrote on Tuesday amid a continued backlash to his weekend tweets that progressive women “go back” to their “broken and crime-infested” countries.

The original tweets were aimed at Democrats Ms Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib. All are American citizens, and three of the four were born in the US.

Since being elected, Ms Ocasio-Cortez has been an outspoken critic of Mr Trump.

But an anonymous Democratic group leaked an internal poll to Axios revealing swinging voters strongly dislike prominent progressive politicians, such as Ms Ocasio-Cortez.

According to the poll, Ms Ocasio-Cortez had a 22 per cent approval rating, and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota had a 9 per cent approval rating among 1003 “likely general-election voters who are white and have two years or less of college education”.

Seventy-four per cent of these voters had heard of Ms Ocasio-Cortez, while 53 per cent had heard of Ms Omar.

“If all voters hear about is AOC, it could put the (House) majority at risk,” a Democrat involved in the 2020 congressional races said. “She’s getting all the news and defining everyone else’s races.”

The same poll viewed the term “socialism” favourably by just 18 per cent of voters compared with 69 per cent who disliked it, while “capitalism” was viewed 56 per cent favourably and 32 per cent unfavourably.

Some progressives have dismissed the survey, saying it just marks the latest attack on the party’s left wing.

But the leak in itself adds to the widening rift in the Democratic Party, where disagreements between party leadership and progressive new politicians have dominated headlines recently.

Ms Ocasio-Cortez, Ms Omar and their fellow freshman congresswomen Ms Tlaib and Ms Pressley have repeatedly butted heads with Ms Pelosi this past week over impeachment, immigration and the consolidation of power in Congress.

Ms Pelosi sparked tensions after she appeared to dismiss the four women during an interview with The New York Times in which she said “they’re four people, and that’s how many votes they got”.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Ms Ocasio-Cortez accused Ms Pelosi of “singling out” women of colour, which prompted criticism from longtime Democrats.

But could it really be enough to cost the Democrats the next election?

Ms Ocasio-Cortez clearly ruffles feathers among both Republicans and Democrats. But whether she’s actually setting back progress for a 2020 Democratic win is not as clear-cut as the new polling implies.

The debate over whether their politics are counter-productive didn’t start with the recent feud with Ms Pelosi. It dates back to the midterm elections after which Ms Ocasio-Cortez was sworn into Congress.

Gorana Grgic, an expert at the United States Studies Centre, says on one hand, the popularity of the “squad” only goes so far.

Dr Grgic also said the ongoing tensions between Ms Ocasio-Cortez and Ms Pelosi had done little to help the Democratic Party’s image.

But at the same time, Ms Ocasio-Cortez is doing her job — she’s representing the concerns of her constituents. “AOC is representing parts of New York that are very progressive and want her to keep fighting the good fight,” Dr Grgic said. “While it doesn’t help for the broader perception of party unity, I don’t think that will have too many detrimental consequences.

“They’re holding Trump to account and really pointing out all the malpractices within the administration. But they’re also setting the agenda on some of the most important public policy issues — everything from healthcare to immigration.”

Mr Trump, who won the presidency in 2016 in part by energising disaffected voters with inflammatory racial rhetoric, made clear he has no intention of backing away from that strategy in 2020.

His words, which evoked the trope of telling black people to go back to Africa, may have been partly meant to widen the divides within the House Democratic caucus, which has been riven by internal debate over how best to oppose his policies.

And the President isn’t backing down either. “It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me,” Mr Trump said on Monday at the White House. “A lot of people love it, by the way.”

And while Mr Trump’s attacks this week brought Democrats together in defence of their colleagues, the gamble is also paying off. His allies noted he was also having some success in making the progressive politicians the face of their party.

The Republican president questioned whether Democrats should “want to wrap” themselves around this group of four people as he recited a list of the quartet’s most controversial statements.

“Nancy Pelosi tried to push them away, but now they are forever wedded to the Democrat Party,” he wrote on Tuesday, adding: “See you in 2020!”

“The Dems were trying to distance themselves from the four ‘progressives,’ but now they are forced to embrace them,” he tweeted on Monday afternoon.

Conservative critics are clearly fascinated with Ms Ocasio-Cortez, having made her the subject of sustained attacks.

Some of the criticism has focused on her self-identifying as a “democratic socialist”, and the viability of her signature proposals like the Green New Deal and abolishing the entire Homeland Security department.

But at the end of the day, at 29 years old, Ms Ocasio-Cortez is ineligible to run for President next year. Why the sustained effort to tear her down instead of focusing on high-profile candidates like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris?

Dr Grgic suggested Mr Trump would be wary of any opponent with a similar skill set to him. And despite Ms Ocasio-Cortez and Mr Trump’s polar opposite political oppositions, their methods of interacting with the media and the wider public are surprisingly similar.

Ms Ocasio-Cortez has used social media to her advantage, with Time magazine naming her one of the most influential people on the internet.

“Donald Trump is wary of anyone who is able to steal the limelight and command so much media attention,” Dr Grgic said. “Her rise was a really unexpected story. Everything since then and the way she’s been able to use social media and really garner a great followership is something Donald Trump has clearly been watching because he himself is very active on these channels.”

Dr Grgic also said there may be a darker dimension at play, comparing the recent racial attacks on Ms Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow young congresswomen to the “birther” conspiracy theory he pushed against Barack Obama.

“In terms of the nativist white nationalist theme, it’s the same sort of attacks. But I think she is someone who is very skilful at playing the media, and she knows she can set the agenda pretty easily given the followership she has,” Dr Grgic said.

SOURCE 

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Journalist accusing Donald Trump of sexual assault says allegations have made him more powerful

A columnist accusing Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her said she’s noticed a strange phenomenon among the US President’s fans.

E. Jean Carroll, 75, told 7.30 the alleged assault in the mid-1990s was a “horrible, violent scene”, but the impact on her life was minimal. “It didn’t even destroy a portion of my life, it destroyed a day in my life. But I got out of it quickly and moved on,” she said.

“And then, the election happened, and we saw 15, 16, 17 women coming forward with their stories (about Mr Trump).”

However, she told host Leigh Sales that she noticed a bizarre trend among the American public as the accusations stacked up.

“The more that women came forward and told their stories, the more popular (Mr Trump) became,” she said. “In this country, voters were attracted by the fact that he could take whatever woman he wanted. So I stayed quiet.”

Mr Trump has strongly denied the claims he sexually assaulted the columnist in a New York City department store in the mid-1990s saying “she’s not my type”.

“I’ll say it with great respect: Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened,” he told The Hill in an interview at the White House.

SOURCE 

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Another hate-filled Leftist -- with the usual distorted view of the truth

He can see no justice in being thrown out of a restaurant for making a nuisance of himself

An angry individual bragged on Twitter last night about how he stood up to a "Nazi" and his violent girlfriend at Hill Country DC, a popular BBQ restaurant in the nation's capital. He implored his social media followers not to patronize the place:

"Just got thrown out of Hill Country DC for standing up to a Nazi. Don’t go there ever again. They support Trump and Nazis. @HillCountryWDC @HillCountryBBQ — TJ Helmstetter (@TheTJHelm) July 5, 2019"

Just who was this "Nazi" Helmstetter so bravely confronted?

"Guy wears MAGA hat at my favorite restaurant. I say “hey are you from dc?” He says “no.” I say “we don’t tolerate racism in this city.” His girlfriend then physically jabs fingers into my chest and starts threatening me. Management tells me to leave, not woman who assaulted me. — TJ Helmstetter (@TheTJHelm) July 5, 2019"

Yep. The gentleman's only offense was his audacity to wear a red MAGA hat. On Fourth of July. When President Trump was planning to give a speech on the National Mall. Yes, how very out of place.

Still, how dare Trump supporters step foot in his favorite restaurant. Didn't they know it was his favorite??

"Spotted two separate tables of people wearing MAGA gear at @HillCountryWDC. Disgusting. Hill Country clean up your act. I have been patronizing you for 10*•+ years starting in NY. Don’t serve Nazis. — TJ Helmstetter (@TheTJHelm) July 5, 2019

"To be clear, it is the Nazi’s 1st amendment right to wear racist shit in public. And it is decent people’s 1A right to tell them they are racist pieces of shit. He exercised his 1A right, and I exercised mine. @HillCountryBBQ mgmt chose to protect the Nazi’s right but not mine. — TJ Helmstetter (@TheTJHelm) July 5, 2019

Dear TJ, you keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Unlike Helmstetter, Trump supporters and Trump associates have been actual victims of public harassment. Most memorably, former Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was refused service at Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia last year because co-owner Stephanie Wilkinson didn't like her. She asked Sanders to leave because, according to her, Sanders supports “inhumane and unethical” presidential policies.

Wilkinson doesn't regret it either. In a recent op-ed, she said Sanders and her "unsavory" ilk "should consider dining at home.”

When other Trump associates have tried to go out for quiet meals, they've run into hecklers who have tended to shout “fascist!” at them, or, in the case of former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, "shame!"

Last week, Eric Trump was literally spat on in a Chicago lounge.

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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