Black Lives Matter • Democrats • Elections • Post • The Left

One Cheer for #BlackLivesMatter

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The great reactionary French philosopher Joseph de Maistre once observed, “all greatness, all power, all subordination rests on the executioner; he is both the horror and bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and in a moment order gives way to chaos, thrones fall, and society disappears.”

In opposition to this terrifying, but essential figure, Maistre placed the soldier: “As far as soldiers are concerned, there are never enough of them, because they kill without restraint and their victims are always honest men. Of these two professional killers, the soldier and the executioner, one is highly honored and always has been by all the nations who have inhabited up to now this planet to which you have come; but the other has just as generally been regarded as vile. Try to guess on which the obloquy falls.”

After Wednesday night’s second Democratic presidential primary debate, we do not need to ponder Maistre’s hypothetical. We know on whom the obloquy falls, as we have seen it fall in real time, while the horror and bond of California, Kamala Harris, was verbally killed without restraint by the soldier and four-term U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii.

There was only one problem: unlike the victims of other soldiers, whom Maistre labeled as honest men, Harris is quite the opposite. Indeed, calling her an “incomprehensible agent” is only accurate insofar as her actions as attorney general of California were incomprehensible in their sheer, sociopathic disgrace.

Like another sociopath exposed to sunlight by an inconvenient truth teller she was never supposed to face, Harris has fallen back on labeling Gabbard an agent of Russia/Syria/everyone polling below her, hoping that one of those epithets sticks enough to make people disregard the four-alarm fire Gabbard raised onstage.

Someone please tell the junior senator from California that slandering and libeling a veteran is bad business. Especially considering that Gabbard, in exposing the malediction of Harris’ record, ironically did the soldier’s duty at its highest: defending the people of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Yet, though I come to bury Harris, I do not come primarily to praise Gabbard—even as she did act in a praiseworthy way. Rather, I come to thank the social movement without which the defenestration of the third-rate Pontius Pilate from the Golden State could not have been nearly so simple.

I refer, of course, to #BlackLivesMatter.

Why do I say this? Because more than any other leftist movement, #BlackLivesMatter has hammered into the heads of the Democratic base the idea that law enforcement—particularly cops and prosecutors—are anything but impartial, “incomprehensible” agents of justice. Rather, they claim, such people are at best unconscious tools of systemic racism, and at worst the willing, sadistic enforcers of such racism.

The Right once rolled its eyes at the calumny directed at the likes of Darren Wilson, Jeronimo Yanez, and Daniel Pantaleo, for what were regrettable but otherwise perfectly justifiable exercises of their duty as police officers. We might even still be inclined to find those men sympathetic, and to doubt the racially revanchist attitude that leads #BlackLivesMatter to condemn them, and all other agents of law enforcement, in the same breath. The cry of “All lives matter” or “Blue lives matter” might still carry music in our ears.

But even if all of this remains true for us on the Right, we cannot deny that the paranoid hypervigilance of BLM (as it’s often shortened) toward law enforcement and its agents has so penetrated the minds of left-wing activists that when a woman who walked, talked, and quacked like a caricature of an unscrupulous prosecutor stood before them, they gave thunderous applause to her accuser.

This didn’t just happen in the debate hall; it also happened on Twitter, where no less an entity than BLM grandee Shaun King affirmed that Harris was guilty of advocating the use of inmates as literal slaves. In that moment, the seemingly bulletproof armor of tokenism around Harris fell in shattered pieces to the ground, and instead of the potential first black female president of the United States (Slay Kweeeeeen!) she was turned into nothing more than—to quote an infinitely amusing new sobriquet for her—“Copmala Harass.”

Naturally, Senator “Harass” has a right to feel wronged by all this. There was a time, sometime around the last Democratic president’s first election, when a “top-tier candidate,” such as Copmala could have shot down the sorts of concerns raised by Gabbard as the desperate flailing of a treasonous left-wing radical, whose hatred of the dedicated public servants of law enforcement was of a piece with her criticism of U.S. foreign policy, and only showed that, darn it, Gabbard was just too soft on crime and too anti-American for even the Democratic Party.

That not one word of such an attack is true would have then been gracefully overlooked by the liberal doyennes of the media, who might cluck-cluck sadly about the necessity of pragmatism in a racist country, but would otherwise never dream of pointing out weakness on the part of such an historic figure.

Gabbard, meanwhile, would be muzzled with the threat of being relegated even further to the back benches, and either would quietly fade away or flame out with much hand wringing from pundits about the sad spectacle of such a promising young politician “losing her way.”

But Toto, I’m afraid it’s not 2008 anymore! And so, the worm of woke hatred for law enforcement has turned. Copmala Harass seems likely to carry on, but the “historic” nature of her candidacy now has a permanent blemish in the eyes of those who otherwise would be most sympathetic to a candidate like her. The irony is that a Democratic government that proposed to put the politics of the woke into practice would need just such a sour, humorless, paranoid Inspector Javert as Senator Harass to lead it, which is perhaps why the woke corporatists of Silicon Valley have been (and remain) so favorable to her candidacy.

Tulsi Gabbard drew blood this round, however. While the junior senator from California hoped to ascend to the presidency by transforming herself into the ghost of Democratic racism past, haunting Joe Biden into repentance and withdrawal from the race, that strategy is no longer possible. Gabbard, speaking with the moral authority of years of BLM activism, showed the world that there was more of gravy than of grave about this particular “ghost,” and it’s now an open question whether she can continue to haunt us.

Gabbard may have fired the shot that ended this particular cop’s malign tour of duty, but the gun was designed, assembled, and manufactured by Black Lives Matter. Thanks to them, the person most eager to claim their mantle has now been hoist on her own petard and summarily impaled. For that service to the nation, we owe BLM a very great debt of gratitude.

Photo Credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

America • American Conservatism • Democrats • Donald Trump • Great America • Post • The Left

The War on The Obvious

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When was the last time you were called racist? If a supporter of President Trump, it’s a safe bet the gross epithet is regularly seared upon your forehead. Always, by those who self-anoint as progressive.

Such a charge, once preserved for the truly primitive of mind, is now stamped and singed on anyone who dares to disagree with anything issuing from the left side of the political aisle.

To point out the obvious is “racist.” This week, President Trump’s blistering comments on Baltimore’s cadaverous state invited the familiar threadbare cries. Perhaps, because that city is majority-black. Or perhaps because that term is the only resort of those defending the indefensible.

Because Baltimore is indefensible. And its denizens deserve better.

President Trump’s greatest gift is his penchant for forcing his foes to defend the indefensible. Baltimore, like many Fishtowns across post-industrial America, is Hell, for the forgotten majority, at least.

Baltimore condemns its citizens with the country’s worst schools and mops up more murders than El Salvador. Its poverty rate is nearly twice the national average.

This scandal, of course, has nothing to do with a congressman’s melanin density. In the 1950s, city residents, buoyed by chrome, copper, and steel industry jobs, enjoyed a 7 percent pay bump on the average American. The number earning middle-class wages was one-fifth higher, poverty one-fifth lower than average America.

Of course, what ails Baltimore ails Youngstown, Ohio, and the burgeoning roll-call of desolate swathes that used to matter. Back when people mattered. And not just the welfare of big business and moneyed interests.

What ails Baltimore is what put Donald Trump in the White House. It is what pushed a majority of Britons to vote to leave the European Union—the economic treachery of self-serving elites who’ve run the show since the 1980s.

Which is why the comments from one man were so disappointing to read. David Simon, writer of the acclaimed TV drama “The Wire,” has nothing but contempt for the president, and spent the weekend tweet-scorching.

If one has actually watched “The Wire,” however, you would think the creator harbored (or should harbor) Trumpian sympathies.

During its glorious five-season run on HBO from 2002 to 2008, “The Wire” was a weekly pastiche of crumbling American institutions. The perils of one-party rule, the decline of newspapers, the soft bigotry of educational decline, the corrosive effects of deindustrialization, and the hopelessness of reforming a system bought and sold by the deepest of pockets.

In the third season, centered upon the tribulations of dockworkers condemned to terminal decline, union man Frank Subotka, today’s Trump Democrat, laments the loss of what once enabled the American Dream: “You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.”

Soon after, the docks go under. And a Democratic mayor sells off the real estate to developers of upscale, yuppie apartments.

The theme is obvious. And Trumpian. And not just within Simon’s fiction.

In an essay in his book, The Wire: Truth Be Told, Simon wrote a screed presaging Tucker Carlson’s famous monologue:

Unemployed and under-employed, idle at a west Baltimore soup kitchen or dead-ended at some strip-mall cash register—these are the excess Americans. The economy staggers along without them, and without anyone in this society truly or sincerely regarding their desperation.

Ex-steelworkers and ex-longshoremen, street dealers and street addicts, and an army of young men hired to chase and jail the dealers and addicts, whores and johns and men to run the whores and coerce the johns—and all of them unnecessary and apart from the new millennium economic model that long ago declared them irrelevant.

This is the world of “The Wire,” the America left behind.

The spirit of that extract would be at home within the burgeoning circles of national conservatism. I’d imagine this journal would happily publish such work.

But for President Trump to point out Baltimore’s problems invites the charge of racism. Bernie Sanders once referred to parts of impoverished Baltimore as “a third-world country.”

Obviously, Bernie is a progressive lodestar, so his comment didn’t register among the Chatterati for whom President Trump’s mere existence tinders a Pavlovian public contempt.

And such public contempt might animate the Democratic base. But it won’t win elections. What will win is the pointing out of obvious problems, combined with the gumption actually to do something about them. President Trump hasn’t read Debrett’s on manners. So what? His voters know that.

Truth is, this why Democrats are so virulently opposed to the president. Without those seemingly intractable problems ensuring legions of lifelong Democratic voters, they have little else to offer. Their record in Baltimore says it all. And Trump-era conservatives aren’t afraid to point out the obvious.

Photo Credit: Cheryl Diaz Meyer for The Washington Post via Getty Images

2016 Election • Democrats • Donald Trump • Elections • Mueller-Russia Witch Hunt • Post • Russia • The Left

Putin’s Patsies

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A patsy is somebody easily manipulated. A pushover. A chump. A sucker.  Look up “patsy” in the dictionary and you should find pictures of Hillary Clinton, media figures, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey and dozens of other leftists and deep state actors, because it’s becoming clear that these people were nothing but willing and eager patsies for Vladimir Putin’s attempts to destabilize our constitutional republic.

For years we had to endure to the Left’s wild conspiracy theories about Donald Trump colluding with Putin to steal the 2016 elections, insinuating or even bluntly stating that they believed Trump to be a traitor to his country. Fact is, even the Weissmann-Zebley investigation, formerly known as the Mueller investigation, didn’t find a criminal conspiracy. Those two partisans had tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, unbelievable powers of investigation and subpoena, and still came up blanks.

While the Mueller hearings were a disaster for Democrats, they did confirm several things: with Mueller’s admission that Aaron Zebley ran the day to day operations of the investigation, we know that it was a staff driven investigation. For reminders’ sake, Zebley represented Justin Cooper, who was Hillary’s IT guy—the one who set up her private email server and smashed Blackberries with a hammer to destroy evidence in the face of an ongoing investigation. Furthermore it was abundantly clear that Mueller did not write his report; it was most likely written by Andrew Weissmann, a partisan Democrat who has donated thousands of dollars to candidates and even attended what was supposed to be Hillary Clinton’s victory celebration. This was an investigation run by the most partisan of partisans on Mueller’s team.

But add to all this one of the more jaw-dropping moments during the Mueller hearings. Robert Mueller claimed he was not familiar with Fusion GPS, the outfit that manufactures news for their clients and gave us the Steele dossier. As Mueller was charged with trying to determine the extent of Russian meddling, it would seem he might be mildly interested in determining who and what Fusion was as they were the outfit that helped give life to and then aggressively spread the Russian collusion fairytale back in 2016.

In admitting that he is unfamiliar with Fusion, combined with Zebley and Weissmann running the investigation, tell you all you need to know about the Mueller investigation: it was a political hit job run by partisans who never had any intention of actually getting to the truth of the matter. The Zebley-Weissmann investigation was, in fact, one of the major operations of what amounts to a soft coup to reverse the outcome of the 2016 elections and remove the duly elected president of the United States.

What we have discovered from real investigations and hearings, however, is that Hillary and the DNC did collude with Russia were used by Putin. From former Justice Department official Bruce Ohr’s testimony we know that Christopher Steele’s dossier had two primary sources: an ex-Russian intelligence officer and a Ukrainian businessman with close ties to Putin.

As even Comey has admitted, the Steele dossier was “salacious and unverified” which is what happens when you have Russians whispering fairy tales in your ear. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the dossier, just as I opined on Fox News back in January of 2018, is a Russian misinformation campaign meant to destabilize the United States and part of a wider effort by Putin to destabilize western democracies.

Consider that Hillary Clinton and the DNC actually funded Russian misinformation; there’s no denying that. They paid their hacks over at Fusion GPS millions to have an ex-British spy compile the dossier. Then many in the media acted as compliant messenger boys, broadcasting the misinformation far and wide, injecting this poisonous and infectious disease into the American public’s bloodstream and relentlessly pushing it for years. Unable to help themselves, or perhaps incapable, mainstream media did double work as the propagandists of the Left and Putin.

Somewhere Putin must be laughing his head off that he hit the jackpot of patsies with the American Left. Which of course was not just limited to Hillary, the DNC and the mainstream media. It also included Comey, Brennan, Clapper, McCabe, and others inside our law enforcement and intelligence agencies. These men and others, apparently blinded by Trump Derangement Syndrome and motivated by partisan politics, were willing to use anything to attempt to frame Trump—including the dossier. If you accept the premise that the dossier was Russian misinformation, our Justice Department, FBI and heads of intel used Russian misinformation to secure a FISA warrant to spy on a U.S. citizen. Let that sink in.

As all of the pieces continue to fall in place, it is hoped that there will be real clarity in the very near future as the Justice Department inspector general’s report comes out and Attorney General Bill Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham finish their investigations into the investigators. It is stunning to note what the American people have been through over the last few years—from hoaxes and conspiracy theories to a soft coup attempt, massive abuses of power, and disregard for constitutional rights. We have to ensure that these things never happen again.

This is why people must bear the full consequences for their actions. There must be jail time for some, a lifetime revocation of security clearances for others, and for others, a complete transparency about what fools they have been and how they were played so that their reputations will never be able to recover. We need all of these things to happen to ensure the future of the rule of law and our constitutional republic.

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Photo Credit: Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images

Big Media • Donald Trump • Post • The Left

Menacing Invective Against Trump Creates Dangerous Climate

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Former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden has bragged on two occasions that he would like to beat up President Donald Trump.

In March 2018, Biden huffed, “They asked me would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”

Biden’s tough-guy braggadocio was apparently no slip. A year later, he doubled down on his physical threats.

“The idea that I’d be intimidated by Donald Trump? … He’s the bully that I’ve always stood up to. He’s the bully that used to make fun when I was a kid that I stutter, and I’d smack him in the mouth.”

Had former Vice President Dick Cheney ever dared to say something similar of President Obama, what would the media reaction have been?

Recently, Sen. Corey Booker (D-N.J.), another presidential candidate, took up where Biden left off:

“Trump is a guy who you understand he hurts you, and my testosterone sometimes makes me want to feel like punching him, which would be bad for this elderly, out-of-shape man that he is if I did that. This physically weak specimen.”

One trait of the Democratic field of presidential candidates is always to sound further to the left than any of their primary rivals. Apparently, a similar habit is to see who can most effectively imagine beating up the president. For now, Booker seems to be in first place.

The current candidates are just channeling three years of sick showboating by Hollywood celebrities.

Actor Robert De Niro has repeatedly expressed a desire to physically assault trump. A month before Trump was elected, De Niro said of him, “I’d like to punch him in the face.” Later, De Niro doubled down with a series of “F— Trump” outbursts.

This is especially dangerous in the aftermath of progressive zealot and Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson’s 2017 attempt to assassinate Republican congressmen at a practice for a charity baseball game. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) was shot and nearly killed. Three other people were also shot and wounded.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), just hours after she was sworn in, said a rally that she had promised her young son that “we’re going to impeach the motherf—r.”

Donald Trump is a controversial president, no doubt. He replies to his critics with strong, often inflammatory invective.

Yet the continued litany of threats to physically assault or kill a president is lowering the bar of assassination, and it will haunt the country long after Trump is gone.

On the day Trump was inaugurated, the pop music star Madonna told a large crowd outside the White House that she had thought of blowing it up.

A few months later, comedian Kathy Griffin issued a video where she held up a bloody facsimile of a decapitated Trump head.

Since then, Hollywood and the entertainment industry have been in constant competition to imagine the most gruesome way of killing off Trump—stabbing, blowing up, burning, shooting, suffocating, decapitating or beating.

Celebrities such as Johnny Depp, Snoop Dogg, George Lopez, Moby, Rosie O’Donnell, Mickey Rourke and Larry Wilmore seem to relish the media attention as they discuss or demonstrate what they consider to be creative ways to kill the president.

It is hard to determine whether their tweets and outbursts are designed to restore sagging careers, are heartfelt expressions of pure hatred, or both.

We saw something similar to the current climate of threatened violence during the re-election campaign and second presidential term of George W. Bush.

A few columnists, documentary filmmakers and novelists went well beyond the boilerplate invective of calling Bush a fascist, racist, Nazi and war criminal, and imagined his assassination in a variety of ways.

But we are now well beyond even that rhetorical violence.

Trump and his critics often go at it relentlessly in interviews, in Twitter wars, and on television and radio. No insult seems too petty for Trump to ignore.

Yet progressives like Biden and Booker seem to think that by bragging of wanting to do violence to the president, they will rev up their base and win attention, as if physical violence is justified by Trump’s unorthodox presidency.

Nonetheless, the current climate is becoming scary. Those who brag of wanting to violently attack the president should worry about where their boasts will finally lead if any of the thousands of James Hodgkinsons in America take such threats seriously and act upon them.

Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

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Black Lives Matter • Democrats • Great America • Identity Politics • Post • The Left

Who’s Using Baltimore?

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The truth behind President Trump’s recent tweets about Baltimore became crystal clear the moment Al Sharpton got involved and the media echoed “racism.” It’s all just another race-hustling con game from the masters of exploiting fake grievances.

When the president riffed on Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and his failure to help his constituents in West Baltimore—home to some of the most blighted ghettos in America—every liberal journalist in the country jumped to see who could be the first among those outraged by Donald Trump’s supposed “racism.”

The winner, undoubtedly, was CNN’s Victor Blackwell—who went full “Oscar clip” and pathetically choked back tears while describing the tweets on national television.

It’s Sharpton’s shameless participation, however, that really pulls the curtain down on the whole farce. As the president aptly pointed out Monday morning, Sharpton basically pioneered this race-hustle game. Reflecting on his 25 years of knowing Sharpton, President Trump warned that “Al is a con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score.”

Sharpton has made a career out of promoting hoax hate crimes—most notably the unbelievably harmful lie about New York police officers raping black teenager Tawana Brawley. Sharpton also incited poor black New Yorkers to attack Jews in “Hymietown,” and regularly supports fake accusations of racism  against the heads of companies and politicians until they pay up—the “shakedown,” as they call it in New York.

Nothing has changed. That’s exactly what Sharpton is doing now. The only difference is that, with President Trump in the White House, every liberal journalist wants in on the action.

None of the people slamming the President are actually looking for “justice” or are genuinely concerned about racism. They’re just looking to score political points.

The media didn’t bat an eye when Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) described parts of Baltimore by saying, “You would think that you were in a Third World country.” They didn’t care when Baltimore’s own disgraced Democrat mayor, Catherine Pugh, complained about the same infestation of rats and dead animals that the President mentioned in his tweet.

“Oh, my God, you can smell the dead animals,” Pugh said during an unguarded walk through part of Cummings’s district last year. “What the hell? We should just take all this [expletive] down.”

Nor did they call out President Barack Obama when he, in a much more formal setting than a silly Twitter battle, used the phrase, “crime-infested,” to describe Democrat-controlled cities such as Baltimore. Now that President Trump has used it, however, that phrase has the entire left-wing media up in arms, absurdly accusing the President of equating black people to an “infestation.”

The difference isn’t the language. It’s that, just like Sharpton, the Democrats know their marks for a shakedown—or at least they think they do.

If the people attacking the president were really concerned about the residents of Baltimore’s blighted neighborhoods, they’d be addressing the concerns those residents raised in the very videos Donald Trump tweeted out. They’d be outraged that the Democratic Party has been taking Baltimore’s votes for granted while consistently failing to improve conditions in that city. They’d be looking for solutions to literal rat infestations.

They would not, however, keep using the same tactics that led to Baltimore’s latest, horrific murder wave—a crime spree that started exactly the moment Black Lives Matter used Sharpton’s signature shakedown tactics to accuse the city’s police of racism after a drug dealer died in police custody.

Luckily, President Trump is wise to this game. He was a prominent businessman in New York City throughout Al Sharpton’s heyday. He knows this race-hustling game, and he knows that it never pays to back down to a notorious con man.

Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

America • Center for American Greatness • Democrats • Donald Trump • Greatness Agenda • Identity Politics • Post • The Left

Donald Trump at the Overton Window

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I shall leave it to the theologians to decide whether it is providential or merely coincidental that it was this very week in 1729, on Tuesday in fact, that the city of Baltimore was founded. I think we can say that, for the genus rattus, the city has been providential, at least since 1967. That was the year Thomas D’Alesandro III—the brother of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (and son of Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., a former mayor of Baltimore)—began the city’s 50-plus years of uninterrupted Democratic Party rule. (If you except the younger Mr. D’Alesandro’s immediate predecessor, you can push the run of Democratic mayors of Baltimore all the way back to 1947.)

Things have been good for the rats in Baltimore. For homo sapiens sapiens? Not so good. Drugs. Violence. Poverty. Squalor. “The Wire” was more documentary than fiction.

But rats have, as the book of Genesis recommended, been fruitful. Also, they have multiplied. Quoth Catherine Pugh, mayor of Baltimore until just a couple of months ago, when she stepped down because of charges of corruption, rats were so plentiful in Baltimore that “you could smell them.”

But that was in September of last year, before Donald Trump turned his gimlet eye on Baltimore, a city that has suffered not only from more than half a century of local Democratic control but also from nearly 25 years of representation by Elijah Cummings, a race-hustling confidence man right out of central casting.

Over the weekend, the president opened up on “King Elijah” in a series of tweets. “Baltimore, under the leadership of Elijah Cummings,” he wrote in one, “has the worst Crime Statistics in the Nation. 25 years of all talk, no action! So tired of listening to the same old Bull . . . Next, Reverend Al will show up to complain & protest. Nothing will get done for the people in need. Sad.”

The president continued: “Baltimore’s numbers are the worst in the United States on Crime and the Economy. Billions of dollars have been pumped in over the years, but to no avail. The money was stolen or wasted. Ask Elijah Cummings where it went. He should investigate himself with his Oversight Committee!”

In short, Baltimore was “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”

It was one thing when Christine Pugh dilated on the rodent theme in 2018.

It is quite another when Donald Trump does it in 2019.

The cries of “racism” came fast and furious against the president, from, among many others, the Rev. Al Sharpton. (I always love writing “the Rev. Al Sharpton”: the incongruity is positively giggle-making.)

That did not faze the president, who promptly repeated and broadened his attack. “There is nothing racist in stating plainly what most people already know,” he wrote, “that Elijah Cummings has done a terrible job for the people of his district, and of Baltimore itself. Dems always play the race card when they are unable to win with facts. Shame!” And then there was this on Sharpton: “I have known Al for 25 years. Went to fights with him & Don King, always got along well. He ‘loved Trump!’ He would ask me for favors often. Al is a con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score. Just doing his thing. Must have intimidated Comcast/NBC. Hates Whites & Cops!”

Politico, along with the rest of the virtue-signaling, chest-less media, sobbed in impotent disbelief. “President Donald Trump on Monday opened new fronts in the bitter tirade he launched over the weekend against Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings and the city of Baltimore, lobbing insults at civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.”

You know that the president’s observation was impermissible because Politico called it “bitter,” which ever since Obama’s “bitter clingers” remark has been code for “right-wing redneck.” But the best thing about Politico’s little melodrama was its description of Sharpton as a “civil rights leader.”

What Al Sharpton really is, as the president noted, is a “con man,” a race-hustling mountebank. Thomas Sowell was less polite but more accurate when he said that Sharpton headed “a trail of slime going back more than a quarter of a century, during which he has whipped up mobs and fomented race hatred from the days of the Tawana Brawley ‘rape’ hoax of 1987 to the Duke ‘rape’ hoax of 2006 and the Ferguson riots of 2014.”

Exactly so.

I suspect that those who see an element of calculation in the president’s tweets about Baltimore, Cummings, and Sharpton are correct. As Monica Showalter noted at The American Thinker, the president has just dramatized a real problem and made the Democrats, and their enablers in the media, defend the indefensible, just as he did with his comments a couple of weeks ago about the racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-American tetrarchy of “the squad.” President Trump, Showalter noted, is “now forcing Democrats to own the urban shambles and filth that characterize one-party blue-city rule, putting all Democrats on their backfoot. That’s what’s behind his surprise Twitter assault that began with Rep. Elijah Cummings and his rat-infested Baltimore district, which pretty much came out of the blue.”

I think that’s probably correct. But there are a few larger issues at play in this episode.

One was articulated several decades ago by the philosopher Sidney Hook, who, writing about the danger of spurious charges of “racism” and kindred epithets, noted

as morally offensive as is the expression of racism wherever it is found, a false charge of racism is equally offensive, perhaps even more so, because the consequences of a false charge of racism enable an authentic racist to conceal his racism by exploiting the loose way the term is used to cover up his actions. The same is true of a false charge of sexism or anti-Semitism. This is the lesson we should all have learned from the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Because of his false and irresponsible charges of communism against liberals, socialists, and others among his critics, many communists and agents of communist influence sought to pass themselves off as Jeffersonian democrats or merely idealistic reformers. They would all complain they were victims of red-baiting to prevent criticism and exposure. [Emphasis added.]

You see the dynamic Hook outlined at work everywhere today, not least in the ridiculous charges that Donald Trump is racist because he attacks people who do bad things who also happen to be black.

Their color has nothing to do with his criticisms. Trump attacks “the squad” not because they are female or “people of color,” but because the are anti-American fanatics. He attacks Elijah Cummings not because he is black but because he is a corrupt pol who has done ill by his district. He attacks Sharpton not because he is black but because he is a race-baiting con-man.

Donald Trump is an equal opportunity scourge. He doesn’t care if you are black or white, male or female, if you behave badly and violate the public trust, he will call you out, baldly. And note this above all: If you attack him, he will attack you back. As Brit Hume pointed out recently, “People discerning a racist motive for Trump’s attack on Elijah Cummings are missing a key point: Trump attacks those who criticize him and his administration, black or white.” Hume follows up with an amusing and color-coordinated list of people Trump has put in their place (Bernie Sanders: crazy, Elizabeth Warren: total fraud, Justin Amash: loser, Joe Biden: low IQ, Harry Reid: insane, etc., etc.).

Beyond the elements of political calculation and polemical style, however, Donald Trump’s recent tweet fests suggest that he may be on the threshold of shifting the Overton Window on race.

Named for the policy analyst Joseph Overton, the famous fenestration describes the range of ideas and rhetoric that are acceptable in public discourse, from the unthinkable and radical at one end to popular ideas and settled policy at the other.

Public discourse in America has long been held hostage to a species of racist moral blackmail that has made it almost impossible to tell the truth about many central social realities. Trump opened the window on that paralyzing darkness when he dared to violate the taboo against criticizing failure when it happened to be presided over by blacks. But to do so is not racist. In fact, it is anti-racist, because it dares to hold everyone, blacks as well as whites, to the same standard.

The ethic of one-sided discriminatory intimidation has been the Democrats’ meal ticket from Jim Crow through the comically misnamed “Great Society” right down to our current crop of race hustlers like Elijah Cummings, Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters, not to mention the hundreds of academics who have based their entire careers on race, not scholarship.

Trump was elected partly because he was “politically incorrect”: he dared to bring the engine of common sense to bear against the malodorous carapace of left-wing ideology.

The president has a long way to go. But he has been the first chief executive in a very long time to have the rough courage to challenge the entrenched, sclerotic establishment that promulgates an agenda of dependency in order to protect its power and perquisites, surrounding the whole with the sleepless sentinels of politically correct interdiction.

It is a rotten, and a deeply un-American, spirit that has risen up among us. Donald Trump will not vanquish it single-handedly. But simply by tearing the scab off this festering infection, revealing it to all in its hideous profusion, he has earned the gratitude of everyone who values liberty and the boundless opportunities of what we used to be able to call, without embarrassment, the American way.

Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.

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Donald Trump • Identity Politics • Post • race • The Left • The Media • The Resistance (Snicker)

How to Tell If a Trump Supporter Is Racist

Dennis PragerBy • in , , , , , ,

Every non-liberal leftist—that is, nearly every Democrat running for president, New York Times and Washington Post columnist, CNN and MSNBC host, and your left-wing brother-in-law—labels every Trump supporter and, of course, President Donald Trump, a “racist.”

And they don’t stop there. Leftists don’t only label the half of the country that supports the president “racist,” they label all whites and America itself “racist.” If your son or daughter attends or recently attended an American university, it is close to certain he or she was repeatedly told that America and all whites are racist. According to the Left, whites are divided between those who admit they are racist and those who don’t admit it.

Every conservative and many liberals know this is a big lie. The great question is: Do leftists believe it? It is impossible to know. But this we do know: If you repeat something often enough, and if your Weltanschauung (worldview) and that which gives your life meaning are dependent upon believing something, you will eventually believe it.

So here is a way to show it is a lie.

Ask any white conservative, including one who supports Trump, the following three questions:

1) Do you have more in common with, and are you personally more comfortable in the company of, a white leftist or a black conservative?

2) Would you rather have nine white leftists or nine black conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court?

3) Would you rather your child marry a black Christian conservative or a white non-Christian liberal?

A white racist would prefer the whites in each case.

I have asked these questions of thousands of Trump supporters at lectures and on my radio show. Not once has a white Trump-supporting conservative said he or she would be more comfortable in the presence of a white leftist than a black conservative or would prefer an all-white liberal Supreme Court to an all-black conservative Supreme Court. Not once has a white Christian conservative said he or she would prefer their child marry a white non-Christian liberal to a black Christian conservative.

If you’re an honest leftist, this should present a powerful challenge to your belief that all white conservatives are racist.

But it won’t. Leftists have too much at stake to confront the truth about conservatives. Everything the left has ever believed has depended upon lying about opponents. From the day Stalin labeled Trotsky—who served as the head of the Red Army and who, along with Lenin, founded the Bolshevik Party—a “fascist,” leftists have lied about their opponents.

Some liberals lie and some conservatives lie, but the truth is both a liberal and conservative value. It has never been a left-wing value. Any leftist who would commit himself to the truth would cease being a leftist. He would either become an anti-left liberal or an anti-left conservative.

“America is racist.” “Whites are racist.” “Trump supporters are racist.” These are all big lies.

So, then, given how important it is to leftists to maintain the lie of conservative racism—along with xenophobia, misogyny, transphobia, and Islamophobia—how would they rebut conservatives’ answers to these questions?

Presumably, they would argue that every conservative who responds to these questions as I described is lying.

But these questions are important—no matter how much leftists ignore or dismiss them—because they perform an important service for conservatives.

I know this from Jewish history. There was so much Jew-hatred in the medieval Christian world that Jews sometimes wondered if there was any truth to the attacks on them. When a whole society denigrates a group, members of the denigrated group start wondering whether any of the attacks on them have any truth. But when the charge of blood libel—that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood to bake matzos for Passover—arose, it liberated Jews from taking any of the anti-Semites’ attacks seriously. Every Jew knew the blood libel was a lie—Jews never consumed animal blood, let alone human blood.

Every conservative knows his responses to these three questions are heartfelt and true, so these questions can help conservatives come to see the Left’s charge of conservative racism as medieval Jews came to see the anti-Semites’ blood libel charge: as a lie.

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America • Center for American Greatness • First Amendment • Post • The Constitution • The Left

Nicholas Sandmann Was Denied the Justice He Deserves

wpengineBy • in , , , , ,

A Jimmy Carter-appointed federal district court judge in Kentucky on Friday dismissed Nicholas Sandmann’s defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post. The Covington Catholic High School student’s two other suits against CNN and NBC remain active, however.

Recall that Sandmann became Public Enemy No. 1 after video surfaced of him perpetrating a heinous crime on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial the day after the 2019 March for Life: standing while white and MAGA-hatted. Even worse, he appeared to smile as Nathan Phillips, a Native American adult who approached Sandmann and his friends, loudly banged a drum in Sandmann’s face.

Sandmann, still a minor, was quickly smeared as a disgusting racist by thousands of adult, leftist pundits (shamefully abetted by many so-called conservatives), politicians, and activists. The Twitter mob said Sandmann had a “punchable face” and was a “prime candidate for wood chipping.” He became the embodiment of “white male privilege,” a scapegoat for all the world’s wickedness. He was even deemed complicit in Christ’s crucifixion! Ultimately, he was abandoned to the mob by his own bishop, as well as by a neighboring bishop who just couldn’t resist the urge to woke-signal.

Applying a Kentucky defamation statute, the court held that 33 statements from seven Post articles and three tweets—which Sandmann alleged were defamatory and entitled him to $250 million in damages—were all protected as opinion under the First Amendment. “Few principles of law are as well-established as the rule that statements of opinion are not actionable in libel actions,” Judge William O. Bertelsman wrote in his ruling.

In assessing the relevant defamation precedents, Bertelsman focused primarily on the first of the seven articles (the other six and the three tweets contained mostly recycled statements from the first article) and determined that nine of the 33 statements were not even “about” Sandmann in particular and thus were not actionable; another seven statements (some of which overlapped with the previous set) could not “form the basis for a defamation claim” because they were mere opinions, not factual statements “capable of being proved objectively correct.”

Most importantly, the court explained that “[i]n determining whether a writing is libelous per se under Kentucky law, courts must stay within the four corners of the written communication.” Which means the “words must be given their ordinary, natural meaning as defined by the average lay person,” and the “face of the writing must be stripped of all innuendoes [sic] and explanations” that could “enlarge or add to the sense or effect of the words charged to be libelous, or impute to them a meaning not warranted by the words themselves.”

Bertelsman also analyzed the allegedly libelous publications in their entirety to “determine if [their] gist or sting [are] defamatory”—in other words, if they would “tend to expose Sandmann to public hatred, ridicule, contempt or disgrace, or to induce an evil opinion of him in the minds of right-thinking people.” For a statement to be defamatory, it cannot be an opinion; it must be about someone in particular; and it has to in itself—without reference to any “extrinsic evidence of context or circumstances [or consequences]”—be injurious to its object. None of the 33 statements, in Bertelsman’s determination, met this threshold, even as many people then and now hold “an evil opinion” of the “smirking” Sandmann.

Unfortunately, that conclusion follows more or less inescapably from Bertelsman’s straightforward application of Supreme Court and Sixth Circuit precedents to the facts of the case.

That Sandmann couldn’t convince the court to find that even one of the nearly three-dozen statements constituted defamation indicates deep rot at the core of this area of First Amendment jurisprudence. Especially so when the district court declined to reach a critical question in defamation law, namely, whether Sandmann was either a “public figure” or a “limited-purpose public figure.” Indeed, it is difficult to see how such an analysis could result in a finding that Sandmann—who did nothing to seek the public-square spotlight and the firestorm that later enveloped him—was anything other than a purely private figure, a classification which would have given his lawsuit a much higher chance of success.

Recently, Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring in the denial of certiorari in McKee v. Cosby—a case that asked the court “to review [the petitioner’s] classification as a limited-purpose public figure,” a classification rooted in the landmark defamation case, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964)—put it best when he wrote, “New York Times and the Court’s decisions extending it were policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law.”

What the New York Times decision and its progeny, including this case, get wrong is that free speech, for the Founding generation, generated a correlative duty to use it responsibly for the pursuit of truth, and its primary regulators were to be state legislatures, not courts. The Founders were not free-speech libertarians (even as the Supreme Court increasingly, and worryingly, has embraced such a relativistic vision of speech), and a world in which the press can, even incidentally, sic a ravenous, self-righteous mob on a teen and plaster racist next to his face forever and suffer no real consequences is not truly a free society.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court described why in 1788:

Libelling is a great crime. . . . With respect to the heart of the libeller, it is more dark and base than that of the assassin, or than his who commits a midnight arson. It is true, that I may never discover the wretch who has burned my house, or set fire to my barn; but these losses are easily repaired, and bring with them no portion of ignominy or reproach. But the attacks of the libeller admit not of this consolation: the injuries which are done to character and reputation seldom can be cured, and the most innocent man may, in a moment, be deprived of his good name, upon which, perhaps, he depends for all the prosperity, and all the happiness of his life.

No less an authority than Dante concurs; he placed liars deeper in hell than the violent because lies “offend against the rational part of the human being, which is nobler and more in need of protection even than the body.”

Sandmann plans to appeal, and he should, even though the Sixth Circuit likely would be forced to affirm Bertelsman’s decision thanks to decades of too-lenient defamation precedent that now robs private citizens of our right to our good names.

The Supreme Court should take this opportunity to reign in its runaway defamation jurisprudence, restore (at least to a degree and in this one area) the original understanding of the free speech clause, and tame our public discourse—which today more resembles the Wild West than a public square of a constitutional republic ordered to truth.

Free speech exists to secure human flourishing and the common good of the nation. We should take it back from those who have weaponized it to create a culture of fear as they push an anti-American agenda.

Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.

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Democrats • Identity Politics • Post • race • The Left

A Visit to Trigger Town

Karl SpenceBy • in , , , ,

The Drudge Report on Thursday featured an arresting headline: “D.C. Tourist Savagely Beaten, Stomped, Spit on by Gang of Youths.” Who could resist clicking on that?

The link went a Gateway Pundit story, which supplies the additional information that the attack took place outside the Washington Hilton Hotel, where President Ronald Reagan and three others were wounded by John Hinckley Jr. in 1981. (The immediate aftermath of that shooting is pictured above; the scene of this month’s mayhem is a few steps to the right.)

The same place where Reagan was shot. Now, there’s a news hook for you. Not that people wouldn’t normally care about tourists getting beaten up at a swank hotel in the nation’s capital, but to capture the public’s attention amid the sea of routine mayhem elsewhere in the District, you need an angle. What better one than this? “Ah, for the dear, dead days of the 1980s, when all you had to worry about was being shot by some lovelorn loser who hoped his derring-do would impress a Hollywood actress. And that’s only if you are president.”

Actually, people had a lot more than that to worry about in 1981. The crime wave that erupted 15 years before was in full flood, and it would not crest for another 10 years. When things were at their worst, almost as many murder victims were piling up in Washington D.C., per capita per year, as Londoners died under the Nazi Blitz and “Vengeance” rockets during World War II (about 75 per 100,000 inhabitants annually, from 1990 to 1995 versus about 80 per 100,000 annually, from 1940 to 1945).

America has quieted down a great deal since then, so much so that a lot of people nowadays act as if crime is no longer a pressing problem for us.

That may be true for some, but not for all. Crime is real, crime is here, and far too many Americans have no way of putting it out of their lives. Without quoting John Donne, let me say that it’s those people we should be thinking about. Even if you’ve never been beaten, stomped, and spat upon, and never expect to be, you need to understand that unprevented and unpunished crime is poisonous for our country.

The Hilton attack happened about 1 a.m. on July 14, 11 days before it was featured on Gateway Pundit and linked to on Drudge. It would never have made the national news at all, had police not released security camera video of the attack in hope of getting a tip from the public as to the identity of the perpetrators.

Uh-oh. Video. That’s a problem, because now everyone can see what the headline writer meant by “gang of youths.” Sure enough, the youths were black, their victim, white.

The Gateway Pundit story quickly garnered more than 5,000 comments. Trigger Warning! Anyone who ventures into the comment section of a story like this will find himself awash in triggering verbiage. He’ll be in the Grand Central Station of Trigger Town.

Gateway Pundit has a reasonable set of guidelines for comments. Profanity, racial slurs, and threats of violence are not OK with them. But in this case, it seems the moderators just threw up their hands and cried, “What’s the use?”

Threats of violence? Many of the commenters lamented that the victim was unarmed and therefore unable to plug the first of his attackers and scatter the rest. Much lip-smacking accompanied discussions of what would happen if the mob tried it in Georgia, Indiana, Texas, Arizona or some other jurisdiction where (unlike in D.C.) “concealed carry” or “constitutional carry” is the law.

Regarding the question of what should be done with the perps in this case, raw blood lust was often on display. Many wanted vengeance not just on the culprits themselves but on the communities that produced them. Suggestions went so far as to include genocide by germ warfare. There was much wistful sighing about how grand it would be if black Americans would all simply disappear.

Vituperative disputes arose among the commenters about what or who was ultimately responsible for the crime. Candidates for blame included the liberal culture, the Baby Boomers, the Boomers’ elderly Pied Pipers (Timothy Leary, Alfred Kinsey, Allen Ginsberg, Dr. Spock, et al.), abortion on demand, violent rap music, irresponsible absentee fathers, the welfare state, the sidelining of Christian faith, and much more.

Race hustlers Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson came in for criticism, naturally. Barack Obama, Lyndon Johnson, and Democrats generally were slammed, too, but Republicans from Lincoln to Trump drew some knocks as well. Not to mention Adam and Eve for eating the apple. And don’t forget Satan cast down from heaven.

Swear words were usually disguised by deliberate misspelling, as was the N-word; both were often deployed in tandem. Racial insults frequently took creative forms, such as: “Good ole DC, District of the Congo,” “If Obama had a son, he’d look like these creeps,” and so forth.

One such insult was seconded by this mock retort: “Racist! Wait but it’s true. I’m so confused.”

The more printable descriptions of the attackers included “black thugs,” “animals,” “bestial devils,” “a pack,” “hyenas,” “hood ratz,” “cockroaches,” “human filth,” “like a disease,” “just like dogs,” “worthless, useless burden on society.”

Much sarcasm was expended on the use of “youths” as a euphemism for all that.

I scanned only about a fifth of these comments, but I can’t go on. You get the idea. Even if I could reach the end of them, this is only one of dozens (hundreds?) of similar Internet news stories that each carry similar comment threads.

The angry, race-focused remarks recounted here may reflect racism, but it’s not the conceited, head-in-the-clouds racism indulged in by self-congratulatory eugenicists and “master race” theorists of decades and even centuries ago. Alexander Hamilton had those people’s number when he wrote this in The Federalist  No. 11:

The world may politically, as well as geographically, be divided into four parts, each having a distinct set of interests. Unhappily for the other three, Europe, by her arms and by her negotiations, by force and by fraud, has, in different degrees, extended her dominion over them all. Africa, Asia, and America, have successively felt her domination. The superiority she has long maintained has tempted her to plume herself as the Mistress of the World, and to consider the rest of mankind as created for her benefit. . . . Facts have too long supported these arrogant pretensions of the Europeans. It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race, and to teach that assuming brother, moderation.

As the Proverb says, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” “Master race” racism died in the rubble of Berlin. Only pathetic shreds of it remain today, resembling nothing so much as the Japanese holdouts who kept emerging from the jungle in the decades after their Emperor surrendered.

Most of the Gateway Pundit comments are not as malignant as that. They’re even understandable, if people would take the trouble, or develop the self-awareness, to understand them. But in the dispute about ultimate culprits, I come down on the side of culture as the cause of the Hilton attack, if only because culture is much easier to change than skin color.

People generally will rise, or sink, to the level that’s expected of them. The problem is that liberalism has expected way too little of blacks, for way too long.

Midge Decter, wife of neoconservative author Norman Podhoretz, wrote all about it in Commentary magazine after a NYC blackout in 1977 sparked a citywide orgy of looting and arson—this in contrast to the neighborly, cooperative spirit with which New Yorkers had met an even more widespread blackout 12 years earlier. Decter’s bottom line:

Young blacks are getting the message from the liberal culture, more subtly but just as surely as from any old-time Southern sheriff, that they are, inherently and by virtue of their race, inferior. There are virtually no crimes they can commit that someone with great influence does not rush in to excuse on the grounds that we had no right to expect anything else. . . . The message they are given, in short, is that they are not fully enough human to be held morally responsible for their own behavior. They are children, as the Southerners used to say, or ironically, they are, in the terminology the New York Times editorialist so much objected to but so inevitably himself implied, “animals.” This is the message that has for some time now, at least since the late ’60s, been consistently transmitted by the “best” people, and certainly widely received by their intended interlocutors. It is, to be blunt about it, the message of liberal racism.

That calamitous New York blackout riot ran from the night of July 13 through the 14th and, in some places, into the following day. This was exactly 42 years before the Hilton attack. Has anything changed since then?

Decter concluded her reproof of the liberal culture that led to the looting by paying tribute to those among its “intended interlocutors” who resisted it:

In the course of the radio coverage of July 14, two little black boys, sounding about twelve years old, were interviewed and announced that they had taken no part in the looting going on all around them. They seemed a bit sheepish. When asked by the interviewer, “Why not?” one of them said, “I was scared of the cops,” and the other one said, “Because my mama would have killed me.” A brave and lucky woman, that mama—no thanks to the culture intent on whispering sweet nada into her little boy’s ear.

Such bravery is what we need now. We need people brave enough to confront the mob—not just the mob on the street, but the mob of social justice warriors who stand ready to condemn any American who battles thug culture as a racist, if white, and as a sellout, an Uncle Tom, an Oreo cookie, if black.

One such courageous voice belonged to Roy Innis. The civil rights figure started out as a black nationalist, but after he lost two sons to murderers, his disgust with crime led him to join the NRA and to support Presidents Nixon and Reagan, New York’s crime-busting Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and conservative Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito. Innis even applauded and befriended subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz.

In 1988, Innis distinguished himself by going all Sumo on Al Sharpton and choking neo-Nazi John Metzger in separate TV talk show appearances. The latter incident is usually described as being triggered when Metzger called Innis an Uncle Tom, but actually, just before pronouncing those words, Metzger had called an elderly rabbi sitting next to Innis a “kike”—perhaps the ugliest of antisemitic slurs. When the show resumed after Metzger and his friends had been expelled from the studio, Innis explained that he would not sit still when someone was being verbally assaulted in his presence. He was standing up for the rabbi.

Innis died two years ago. Who today will carry on for him? Maybe it’ll be “Jay D,” one of the Gateway Pundit commenters and seemingly the only one among them who is not an “angry white male.” Here is what Jay D said of the Hilton attack:

Sad. I am a black guy, and I hope they find these a-holes & throw them under a jail.

I looked up Jay D’s comments in earlier, unrelated threads, and it’s evident he’s not just pretending to be black. He’s not on the Trump Train yet, quite the contrary. But count him among the many black Americans who are fed up with crime.

While the violence that went on in front of the Hilton is despicable, the reaction to it may indeed be intemperate in many cases. We used to call this reaction “white backlash,” back when black ghettos were burning all over the country. Who could be blamed for wanting to turn away from all this unpleasantness and pretend none of it is happening? But the violence is happening, and the backlash is building, and no amount of social media “moderating” can scrub it out of existence.

Liberals love to call “law and order” a code for racism. It is not. “Law and order” is the antidote to racism. Only law and order can pull our country back from the chaos and hatred we’ve just seen on display.

Let us join hands, white and black, and require our fellow citizens to show the common decency that’s so painfully absent from that Washington Hilton footage. If we demand law and order and enforce that demand vigorously enough, we may yet find that people, black as well as white, will rise to the challenge we’ve set for them.

Photo Credit: Dirck Halstead/Liaison

 

Center for American Greatness • Cultural Marxism • Democrats • Identity Politics • Post • The Left

Woke Racism

Victor Davis HansonBy • in , , , , ,

Well before Sigmund Freud formalized the idea of “projectionism”—the defense of one’s own shortcomings and sins by attributing them to others—it was a common theme in classical literature and the New Testament: the ridiculing of the mole on someone else’s nose to hide one’s own boil.

The term projection more or less sums up much of the woke identity politics movement, in which obsessions with racial privilege and tribal exceptionalism are justified by accusing others of just such bias.

While such racist projectionism can often be a psychological tic that assuages the guilt of one’s own rank prejudice, just as often accusing others of racism is a peremptory careerist move to win media attention, lucre, or job advancement.

Racists—those who assume those of different races always act collectively in predictable ways, usually far worse than does their own tribe—who charge racism assume that unlike the proverbial wolf crier, there is currently no downside to their hysterias and fantasies.

That is, the racist who for a variety of reasons lobs “Racist!” at others assumes that, even when his tired charges are proven false, in our postmodern society he can argue that these accusations in theory always could be true, and therefore no one would ever accuse a self-identified victim as a racist perpetrator himself.

For example, a Louisiana State University student, who falsely claimed she encountered a noose on campus—supposedly planted by whites to intimidate African-American students such as herself—was hardly contrite about inflaming tensions with a false accusation when the “noose” turned out to be simply a dangling power wire cable. Instead of apologizing, the accuser redoubled her claims: “Considering what is currently happening in this country, someone hanging a noose certainly seems plausible . . . Black students all over are being threatened for speaking out. I’ve previously been threatened for talking about race at LSU.”

The Logic of the Tribe
In some sense, today’s hip new racists have adopted the ideology of Lester Maddox and not Martin Luther King, Jr. Segregation, not integration, is the new racist mantra—by dorm, by theme house, by caucus, by safe space, by graduation ceremony.

True intersectionality is impossible for racists—given that competing tribal agendas can never be reconciled. Far from creating force-multiplying woke ideologies by uniting various “identities”—black, Latino, Asian, LGBTQ, female, and non-American—intersectionality becomes a logical contest among professed victims to acquire preeminent tribal victimhood, and with it, DNA-sanctioned superiority.

The logic of the tribe leads to sectarian warfare, not harmony. We see just that when Asians revolt against black and Latino preferences in college admissions. Feminists push back against the endemic misogyny of rap music that is given an intersectional pass to demean women and freely employ the n-word. There is sometimes less, not greater, tolerance for unapologetic homosexuality in supposedly hyper-macho Latino culture. Doctrinaire Islam makes few concessions for the Muslim convert to Christianity; he is still an infidel to be shunned, even killed.

Jussie Smollett hired two black associates to dress up as white Trump-hatted supporters to stage a fake attack on himself. He hoped to gain sympathy as a victim of supposed rampant intersectional racist hatred in the age of Trump. Apparently, only that way would the pathetically desperate Smollett restore his sinking brand and jumpstart his fading acting career—through becoming an icon of the innocent black man symbolically lynched by predatory whites.

Smollett, himself half-white, accused an innocent large segment of the U.S. population as racist without any worry of the consequences from such false charges. And rightly so: Smollett has faced little pushback, remains in the news, and believes that no one ultimately will dare to charge him as a racist who committed a hate-crime.

The Covington Catholic fiasco illustrated the same modus operandi. Native American activist Nathan Phillips sought media exposure and careerist advantage by deliberately confronting a group of young Catholic students on the National Mall. Phillips hoped the resulting staged optics would show privileged, male, young, white Christians with red MAGA hats haranguing a wizened Native American elder and Vietnam veteran.

Phillips succeeded in his quest for universal victim status, media exposure, and the demonization of the Covington school students, despite being quickly exposed as a faker who never set foot in Vietnam and a serial racial provocateur.

Most of the media bought his ruse and have retreated to the usual fallback defense for faked racist accusations: in a racist America, the charges could in theory have been true, and therefore that they were demonstrably not true this time means little.

Enter the Anti-Enlightenment Squad
The new racism is epidemic among those in the so-called squad, the self-referenced nickname for four media-obsessed, first-term congressional representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who without their daily charges of bias largely would be unknown back-benchers laboring away in obscurity.

Take Pressley’s recent formulation of the new racism at a recent Netroots Nation conference:

If you’re not prepared to come to that table and represent that voice, don’t come, because we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice. If you’re worried about being marginalized and stereotyped, please don’t even show up because we need you to represent that voice.

In sum, Pressley just outlined the classic anti-Enlightenment mindset: we are all permanent captives of our superficial race, religion, and sexual orientation. We must at all times think, act, and speak in such tribal fashion—and do so monolithically and collectively, in adopting the party line as set down by such elites as those like Pressley herself.

Blacks who oppose affirmative action, or Muslims who recognize Israel, or “queers” whose sexual preferences are incidental, not essential to their personas are thus declared not authentic and thus not to be welcomed by Pressley into the new racialist Democratic Party.

In practical terms, Pressley assumes that whites, reportedly about 70 percent of the population, tune her logic out. That is, they should never take her own racist advice and vote en masse according to their superficial shared skin color. If they did, the 55 percent of actual voters who are white in her otherwise minority-majority congressional district might never have elected someone who, according to her own rationale, is not part of their own tribe.

Ilhan Omar said the following in a 2018 interview with Al Jazeera when asked about purported American paranoiac fear of “Islamic terrorism”:

I would say—our country should be more fearful of white men across our country, because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country. And so if fear was the driving force of policies to keep America safe, Americans safe inside of this country, we should be profiling, monitoring, and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men.

Omar was not merely racially stereotyping but lying as well. African-Americans, not whites, according to the various Department of Justice figures, commit a somewhat larger percentage of the nation’s likely total of annual homicides despite comprising a percentage of the population almost seven times smaller.

A Jacobin Resurgence
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) of being a racist for criticizing fellow squad members. In turn, Pelosi recently had called Trump a racist for his tweeting and declared that his efforts to secure the border were racist efforts to hurt the nonwhite.

No matter. There is no exemption from being charged with racism for old, rich, white, and liberal females like Pelosi. In the new racist cosmology, the multimillionaire Pelosi can never escape her white privilege. One element of the new racism is thus Jacobinism—the idea that the circle of racists always widens until the racists devour one another with charges that everyone but themselves is insufficiently racially woke.

Smollett taught us that is was not enough for a gay man to be attacked by homophobes, or a liberal crusader to be attacked by right-wing Trumpers, or a black man to be attacked by white racists. In the ever-spiraling rules of woke racism, only a gay, left-wing, and black victim can win singular revolutionary authority—and only when invented Trump fanatics scream racial taunts and routinely patrol the liberal neighborhoods of Chicago nightly armed with bleach and nooses.

On matters of immigration, it is no longer enough to endorse the old bipartisan compromises on border security and amnesties or to see the problem as one of illegality. No longer is it sufficient to advocate making DACA the law of the land and extending amnesty to the “dreamers.” Now instead the border has become for some presidential candidates an existential racial question of bringing in millions of supposedly “nonwhite” rather than just illegal immigrants—and in public photo ops escorting them as they illegally cross the border—providing them with amnesty, legal residency, sanctuary from immigration enforcement, and free health care, while calling anyone a “racist” who complains that such caravan immigration is not diverse, legal, measured or meritocratic.

Anti-Semitism Again
Another trait of the new racism is the old anti-Semitism. Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, and Tlaib want Congress to endorse the anti-Israeli boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement to isolate the Jewish democracy—as if Israel was an international outlaw far worse than China, North Korea, or Iran.

Omar (“Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”) has likened her effort to endorse BDS to the 1930s humane boycott of Nazi Germany. Earlier she claimed, with a clumsy “two Benjamins” metaphor, that naïve Americans were deluded by Jewish money and Benjamin Netanyahu into supporting Israel against their supposed own interests.

Ocasio-Cortez believes the detention centers at the border (where far fewer illegal aliens have died annually than during the Obama administration) are analogous to Nazi concentration camps and thus by extension the Holocaust. Apparently, she believes that the 218 tragic deaths in 2018 at the border (471 died in 2012), as a result of a massive wave of illegal migrants into the United States, is analogous to the 6 million Jews who were gassed or starved to death during World War II.

In the puerile mind of honor student Ocasio-Cortez, the 15,000-20,000 Jews who died on some days in the Nazi death and concentration camp archipelago are analogous to 218 accidental deaths at the border of those who entered the United States illegally en masse. When everything is the Holocaust and everyone is a Nazi, then nothing is and no one is. It is hard to calibrate whether Ocasio-Cortez’s anti-Semitic editorializations were designed to downplay the Holocaust or libel her own country—or both.

Being a woke anti-Semite is no longer any big deal. Just ask woke novelist Alice Walker, who is a fan of unapologetic anti-Semite David Icke—or for that matter the woke New York Times that published two anti-Semitic cartoons. For the woke, no one cares about having his picture taken with Louis Farrakhan (Barack Obama included) or mouths anti-Semitic tropes like Georgia congressman Hank Johnson’s comparison of Jewish settlers to “termites.”

What will put an end to this new anti-enlightenment racism of the woke that is emulating the familiar overt racism of the past? It will cease only when the majority of Americans of all racial heritages are brave enough to call out those projectionists who are obsessed with constructing or promulgating racism as the purveyors of hate themselves, the sad and the pathetic dividers who seem believe they are innately and collectively superior on the basis of their superficial appearance or creed.

Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.

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Big Media • Books & Culture • Online Censorship • The Left

A Directory of Politically Incorrect, Algorithmically Stifled Vloggers

Edward RingBy • in , , ,

Anyone who doesn’t believe the Right is being suppressed systematically by the communications monopolies of Big Tech either is not paying attention, is hopelessly biased, or is thoroughly brainwashed.

The process of suppression takes many forms. It isn’t merely suppression of conservative viewpoints on the major social media platforms (Google, Facebook, Twitter), but suppression of the related apps (Apple, Amazon), exclusion from the principal funding sites (Patreon, Kickstarter, GoFundMe), exclusion from the major online payment processors (PayPal, Stripe), and in some cases even access denial by the internet service providers (AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon).

In most cases, suppression has not been total. One of the first to be banished, Alex Jones, still has his “Infowars” website; one of the more recent casualties also survives online as a stand-alone, the relaunched Milo Yiannopoulos’s “Dangerous” website. But in the monopolistic communications infrastructure of social media platforms, apps and funding sites, they don’t exist. If you don’t know where to look for these orphaned websites, you won’t find them.

Suppression of conservative content began in earnest after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, intensified further in the months immediately preceding the 2018 midterms, and further still with the wave of purges that took place this spring. This story has been told again and again, a very recent example would be testimony by Dennis Prager before the U.S. Senate on July 16.

Finding the Vloggers Who Have Been Suppressed
It is impossible to track every conservative who has been suppressed online. For every major figure who is attacked, there are hundreds of minor figures who also have been attacked by the leftist complaint warriors and quietly deboosted, demonetized, shadowbanned, or just plain eliminated.

Here then, is a list of conservative YouTube vloggers who are still active on that platform. If you regularly view one of these channels, you will probably still see them recommended. But otherwise, even if you view similar content, it is unlikely they will appear as “recommended videos,” or if they do appear, fewer of them will appear, and those few will appear less often. Instead you will be referred to mainstream conservative channels, starting with Fox News. This shift began in April 2019, and is specifically aimed at limiting exposure to these independent platforms.

It is important to note that some of the vloggers listed here actually do produce content most conservatives would consider objectionable. It is not possible to vet the entire body of work of every one of the individuals on this list. What is remarkable, however, is how in a fair online universe, some of these vloggers should never have come under attack. The diligent Tim Pool and the impeccable Dennis Prager come to mind.

There are many others for whom there is absolutely no case to be made for their suppression. But so what? What if some of this content is truly offensive and objectionable? Should it be suppressed?

One fledgling attempt to circumvent the biased online monopolies is the video platform BitChute. While the site has risen to an impressive worldwide Alexa ranking of 4,065 (the YouTube monopoly is ranked No. 2), it still has bugs and glitches. But BitChute’s community guidelines explicitly endorse freedom of expression, and at least so far, a commitment to unbiased policing of content. On the question of suppression, BitChute’s website says “The mere fact that an idea is disliked or thought to be incorrect does not justify its censorship.”

Standing on that principle, the ideal online media platform would treat all websites equally, allowing them to rise and fall based on viewer preference, or as the cliché aptly puts it, “in the marketplace of ideas.”

With all this in mind, and based on the admittedly nebulous principle that the enemy of your enemy is your friend, here is a list of the “reactionary right” vloggers as catalogued in a report published in Fall 2018 by the left-of-center organization Data and Society:

The Reactionary Right on YouTube according to Data and Society

James Allsup– 452,936 subscribers, 72 million views

Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) – 964,511 subscribers, 297 million views

Owen Benjamin– 262,712 subscribers, 51 million views

Taleed Brown (That Guy T) – 96,997 subscribers, 6 million views

John Canales (Mouthy Buddha) – 142,512 subscribers, 10 million views

Mike Cernovich– 77,704 subscribers, 2.6 million views

Lauren Chen (Pseudo Intellectual) – 364,058 subscribers, 34 million views

Mark Collett– 93,694 subscribers, 9 million views

Steven Crowder– 4 million subscribers, 817 million views

Dave Cullen (Computing Forever) – 410,286 subscribers, 97 million views

Marcus Follin (The Golden One) – 95,822 subscribers, 12 million views

Nicholas Fuentes (America First) – 37,731 subscribers, 700,000 million views

Jean-François Gariépy– 47,262 subscribers, 4 million views

Faith J. Goldy– 105,799 subscribers, 6 million views

Timothy Gionet (Baked Alaska) – now totally banned from YouTube

Rebecca Hargraves (Blonde in the Belly of the Beast) – 130,787 subscribers, 7 million views

Sam Harris– 339,111 subscribers, 5 million views

Brooks Heatherly (No Bullshit) – 651,990 subscribers, 136 million views

Jeff Holiday– 105,671 subscribers, 9 million views

Matt Jarbo (Mundane Matt) –  134,698 subscribers, 89 million views

Felix Lace (Black Pigeon Speaks) – 532,341 subscribers, 59 million views

Ezra Levant (Rebel Media) – 1.3 million subscribers, 452 million views

Chris Maldonado (Chris Ray Gun) – 605,475 subscribers, 92 million views

Gavin McInnes– 349,149 subscribers, 41 million views

Mister Metokur– 305,538 subscribers, 53 million views

Stefan Molyneux– 919,197 subscribers, 276 million views

Antonia Okafor– 5,841 subscribers, 0.2 million views

James O’Keefe (Project Veritas) – 311,027 subscribers, 42 million views

Henrik Palmgren and Lana Lokteff (Red Ice TV) – 327,959 subscribers, 46 million views

Jordan Peterson– 2.2 million subscribers, 110 million views

Brittany Pettibone– 125,716 subscribers, 8 million views

Tim Pool– 574,254 subscribers, 98 million views

Colin Robertson (Millennial Woes) – 54,299 subscribers, 5 million views

Joe Rogan– 5.8 million subscribers, 1.4 billion views

Dave Rubin– 1.0 million subscribers, 219 million views

Martin Sellner– 26,040 subscribers, 1.4 million views

Ben Shapiro– 792,908 subscribers, 47 million views

Lauren Southern– 716,792 subscribers, 59 million views

Richard Spencer– 2,454 subscribers, 111,345 views

Ayla Stewart (Wife with a Purpose) – 11,776 subscribers, 652,907 views

Jared Taylor (American Renaissance) – 113,447 subscribers, 12 million views

Annand Virk (Bunty King) – 66,984 subscribers, 0.5 million views

Andy Warski– 245,152 subscribers, 45 million views

Tarl Warwick (Styxhexenhammer666) – 380,464 subscribers, 182 million views

Paul Joseph Watson– 1.7 million subscribers, 400 million views

Blaire White– 520,103 subscribers, 65 million views

Milo Yiannopolous – banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Patreon

Other Members of the Reactionary Right According to Data and Society

James Damore – former Google employee, author of “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”

Larry Elder – Larry Elder Show

Andrew Klavan – The Andrew Klavan Show

Michael Knowles – The Michael Knowles Show

Candace Owens – Candace Owens Show

Dennis Prager – founder of Prager University

Can the Online Conservative Presence Be Effectively Suppressed?
Since the latest assault on internet free speech, many of these YouTube channels have seen their referral visits drop by 50 percent or more. But there remains a fluidity to the conservative presence online that may be impossible to suppress. First because many of these channels are so big that shutting them down would provoke an uproar, as happened this past May when YouTube used out of context remarks made by Carl Benjamin to temporarily delete his account. Benjamin, whose channel is called “Sargon of Akkad,” has nearly 1 million subscribers and has delivered nearly 300 million views.

Other channels are even bigger. The inimitable Paul Joseph Watson has delivered 400 million views on his YouTube channel; Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media has delivered over 450 million views; Joe Rogan’s channel has delivered well over 1 billion views.

Moreover, the traffic trends are dramatic.  Jordan Peterson, whose informed but politically unwelcome candor on gender issues catapulted him to worldwide fame, had just over 90 million views when last reported in April, he’s now delivered over 110 million views.

If the conservative presence online is protected by dozens of too-big-to-squelch pundits with burgeoning audiences, it is also protected by thousands, if not tens of thousands of much smaller content producers who are perpetually researching and posting, producing a torrent of content that can’t possibly be contained. For every Joe Rogan or Paul Joseph Watson, there are a thousand lesser-known but worthy conservative pundits such as Fleccas Talks, Conservative Resurgence, or Blue Collar Logic, diligently posting and building their audiences.

In some ways, the biggest advantage favoring online conservatives is the fact of their suppression. While some “conservative” or alt-Right content may indeed be objectionable, all of it is granted cachet by virtue of it being forbidden. And when so much of what conservatives post online is not only true, but in direct contradiction to what is being routinely spewed forth from the approved mainstream sources of news, it triggers feelings of betrayal in the hearts of fair-minded, truth-seeking liberals. They have their so-called red pill moment. They walk away.

The issue of internet censorship is only one significant fraction of the transformations heralded by digital technology and artificial intelligence. A troubling article in the Summer 2019 issue of American Affairs, “Algorithmic Governance and Political Legitimacy,” explores the ways in which algorithms could become even more faceless arbiters of misguided policies than the faceless bureaucrats of the last century.

The challenges facing society wrought by technology, and the leftist dominated monopolies that currently control technology, reach well beyond free speech. But despite the ongoing AI-enabled crackdown on free speech, the nature of the internet itself may yet defy containment. It may yet fulfill its original promise to deliver irrepressible truth and freedom to the people in America, and everywhere else in the world.

Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.

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America • Democrats • Post • Progressivism • The Left

The Great Excluded and Our Nationalist Future

Matthew BooseBy • in , , , ,

The Trump versus “the squad” brouhaha merely affirms what pundits have been saying since Trump’s MAGA movement swept up the American Right in 2016: American politics, from here on out, is American nationalism versus multiculturalism. A drift on the American Right towards nationalism, and deeper polarization between multiculturalism and nationalism, seems inexorable.

Trump’s “go back” tweets and the ensuing chaos expressed a widely felt frustration on the Right—a feeling that led to Trump’s election in the first place. That frustration is with the fundamental unfairness of America’s current multiculturalist regime.

Multiculturalism declares that America is for “everyone,” except, of course, for those it pointedly excludes. Trump’s base are the Great Excluded. Until Trump came along, they were up for grabs politically, waiting for someone who cared about them and what they care about.

Leftists balk at the “bigotry” of Trump and his supporters. To them, nationalism is vulgar, uncouth, and racist by definition. They dismiss Trump supporters as racist. The Left’s lazy recourse to labeling everything “racist” says more about diversity politics than about the people leftists constantly slander.

Many on the Left now find it incontrovertible that Trump, and all his supporters, are xenophobes.

Republican support for Trump went up after his tweets. How could so many Americans be so hateful? But these charges merely add insult to the injury of the Left’s abuse. What about leftist racism and bigotry? Doesn’t that count?

Certainly not, interjects the polite, well-educated leftist. It isn’t possible to be bigoted toward certain groups, namely, those which enjoy the institutionalized hegemony of their colonialist ancestors, or whatever middlebrow shibboleths the badly educated are taught by their sociology professors to repeat.

But of course the Left is bigoted, toward Christians, toward whites, toward American nationalists. There are two sets of rules, and the American Right is chafing under the fundamental asymmetry of this political landscape.

Fed Up With Multiculturalism
The Right is waging a pitched battle. Under the Left’s rules of engagement, put in place by cultural enforcers in power, one must always defer to a “person of color” when such a person is speaking “their truth.” Humans are apportioned their degree of moral worth based on how oppressed they are. It’s the job of the “oppressors” to shut up and do what they’re told. The “oppressed” must all think the same way, too. Everyone must agree that America is racist in its very soul, a nation founded on genocide, that all Christians are homophobes, and that all white people are saddled with the original sins of Columbus and Hernando Cortes.

The Right is fed up with multiculturalism, its asymmetrical rules and its deleterious effects. They’re tired of being told that immigrants don’t need to assimilate, learn English, or even enter the country legally, while they are accused with the worst names for wanting borders, a decent society, and the rule of law. They are tired of being disparaged by people who express manifest hatred for their nation, but who get a pass because they happen to be of a certain race.

The Left will never stop accusing proud Americans of racism and xenophobia because multiculturalism asserts that America is sinful at its foundation and needs to be fundamentally reimagined. America’s history is thought to be racist and in need of total revision. Its future belongs to “everyone”—that is, everyone except those who multiculturalism isolates as the enemy.

Anything which belongs to tradition and heritage—American symbols, heroes, religious tradition—must be discarded, or else repurposed. Anyone who contradicts this vision is a “racist,” and the Founders are racists too, except for when their writings can be used to justify open borders. The Bible, rather than a book of wisdom and truth, a cultural touchstone, is a historical source document to be disingenuously cited to support this or that woke policy.

Multiculturalism’s god is diversity. It hates the very things that make a country prosper—cultural cohesion, morals, social trust, a national identity—while valuing the very things that lay nations low. In place of fertility and careful stewardship of culture, multiculturalism preaches anti-natalism and cultural suicide.

Nationalism and love of country are equated with xenophobia. Christianity is branded hateful and homophobic, a relic of the past, and morals are mocked, or else suspected of harboring a secret, malevolent agenda. The rule of law, citizenship, and borders are “racist” and exclusionary, solely because they refer to a distinct nation and people.

Elected officials who encourage immigrants not to assimilate, to defy the law, and to trample over American sovereignty, who want to abolish the meaning and distinction of citizenship, are lauded as heroes—not because they love America, but because they despise it openly.

Stop Playing Their Game
Standing against the Left’s vicious, resentful, race-obsessed multiculturalism is the “love it or leave it” nationalism of the Right: “it doesn’t matter what your skin color is or where you’re from. If you don’t love this country, you can leave.”

But under multiculturalism, it is okay for the Left to disparage Americans and their country with impunity, to persecute and slander and abuse anyone who stands in their way. Americans are ordered simply to lie down and take it.

Trump challenged this whole con game, and the Left is furious. They’re not angry because Trump is “racist.” They’re mad because he called out the diversity scam. Is it any wonder that his supporters like him more for it? The American Right has boiled in helplessness under these rules for decades. It seems that, finally, as they witness the brazen theft of their country by unscrupulous people who hate their nation, who think it is wicked at its core and needs to be fundamentally reimagined, they are just about fed up.

Until now, that is until Trump, the Left forced its elite ideology on the American public without any pushback. This was a fundamentally non-democratic endeavor. Leftists captured power with a “long march” through the institutions, and through generations of networking, activism, and ceaseless intimidation, they created a new American religion—multiculturalism—to replace and suppress everything that came before roughly 1965.

Except this was never done democratically. Americans never voted to let 11 million (some say upwards of 22 million) illegal immigrants into their country. They never voted to send millions of jobs overseas. They never voted for gay marriage or abortion on demand. They never voted to have their schools and universities staffed by woke scolds to tell their children what sorry, shameful, racist, misogynist monsters they are. They never voted to have Christianity chased from the public square and relegated to the cultural status of a yoga class.

Everybody has their breaking point, and it seems that in 2016, the American Right had just about had it. So they voted for the angry, Bad Orange Man who at least acknowledged how mad they were.

A New Nationalism Is the Logical Endpoint
Fast forward to 2020, and the landscape hasn’t changed much, with one exception. The leftists who spent decades spitting on the “bigots” have multiplied their arrogance and their bile. Before, it was “compassionate immigration reform.” Now, it’s abolish ICE, borders, and citizenship. Before, it was equality for the races. Now, it’s f–k white people. Before, it was “safe, legal, and rare.” Now, it’s infanticide at any time, for any reason. Before, it was “tolerance” and “marriage equality.” Now, it’s a liturgical season of compulsory, ecstatic celebration.

So, yes, nationalism is the future of the American Right. It’s Newton’s Third Law of Politics. The American Right’s pivot to nationalism is just the logical consequence of nationalism having been suppressed for so long.

National pride is a natural feeling. Human beings weren’t made to hate their country. No amount of political re-education can breed out the love in one’s heart for their homeland, neither can it suppress the human craving for what is true and good. Leftism seeks to suppress the irrepressible, because it must stifle, at last, our humanity. It must quash curiosity, humor, common sense, virtue, patriotism, and faith.

Americans today are living through a social experiment, now 50 years running at least, accelerating in the last few years, that runs against the grain of human nature and common sense. For masses of people, it seems that the country is simply upside down. The good and the true are spurned, while the wicked and the false are uplifted.

Late term abortion is cherished as an inalienable right, as a positive good, while the nuclear family is assailed as a retrograde bastion of bigotry. Genders multiply without warning. Religious feeling is muted and diminished, allowed to exist in an alley of an alley of an alley of the public square and reduced to little more than a spiritualist hobby—tax free.

Americans are told that they are inferior, less American, than people they have never heard of from halfway across the world, who cannot speak their language and have never set foot in their country. They are told that they are insane for doubting that the American president is a Russian agent. Their religion is mocked by jackasses on television and in the mass media. The only time their faith is invoked, is when it is used as a weapon against them. They are told constantly how privileged and powerful they are, and yet they feel distinctly the opposite.

To add insult to these thousand cuts, they are told that if they dare to complain, if they dare to disobey, then there is no slander too vicious for them. They must be exposed as bigots, racists, and Nazis, and chased from public life, fired from their jobs, and forced to eke out an existence in obscurity, isolation, and shame.

Now, doesn’t that sound reasonable?

Where the Fight Leads
Human beings can only take so much nonsense and abuse. The world that the Left has created is a massive lie, propped up by relentless propaganda and threats of unpersoning to anyone who would pull back the curtain. Masses of Americans are being made to bear witness to evil and plain absurdity. They are being enjoined to celebrate that the world has been turned upside down.

The virtual reality that leftism requires must appear seamless. It must appear that no other world is desirable or even possible. But its principles are too obviously divorced from reality and common sense for people to accept them without the constant threat of reputational harm.

The more they protest, the more obvious the cracks in this artificial world appear, the louder the enforcers scream: “Diversity is our strength!”

The Left plainly realizes that this is not a recipe for peace, because they are willing war. They realize that what they want is unnatural, that it requires immense suppression and abuse, constant reinforcement of obvious, obtuse falsehoods, just to keep the experiment humming along.

And what have decent Americans done to deserve all this? Is it because their ancestors once owned slaves—which in the case of most, isn’t even true anyway? Or that they think men and women are different, and that to will oneself a different sex doesn’t make it so? That they have certain rights as citizens, and that nations should be sovereign?

Most look around them and they don’t see a country that is filled with racism and hate – except for the hate that is directed at them, from Hollywood actors, from the pages of prestigious newspapers, even their elected officials! They encounter this contempt everywhere they look. It can’t be tuned out; it saturates their culture, assails them from all directions.

It has dawned on the American Right that in our multiculturalist regime, they are not treated equally. They can see that the Left clearly and manifestly hates their country, their religion, their race, but they are not allowed to push back.

Is it any wonder that the Great Excluded are clinging to Trump ever more tenaciously? Trump’s supporters have been called racist so often, for so little, it no longer means anything to them. Now they are being told to abandon the one person who represents them—and that it if they don’t, then they are the lowest of the low—because he singled out four ungrateful narcissists who despise them and their country.

The Left isn’t offended by the “racism” of Trump. They’re offended by the audaciousness of people who refuse to play by their rules.

Now the Left, more urgently than ever, wants to suppress, shame, and disenfranchise the Right. The Left strategizes in the open how best to do it: abolish the Electoral College, perhaps the Senate? Or would it be more expeditious to have an open borders policy and simply import Democratic voters?

Trump’s supporters have wised up to the con game. They realize that the future of the country belongs to “everyone”—except them. The more the Left attacks national pride, national sovereignty, citizenship, and immigration restrictions as racist, the more nationalist the Right will become.

It seems inevitable that the Right, having realized they have nothing to lose, will become more unapologetically nationalist. They understand that the Left will keep calling them racists and bigots until they no longer have a country left to defend.

Photo Credit: Found Image Holdings Inc/Corbis Historical via Getty Images

Center for American Greatness • Cultural Marxism • Democrats • Identity Politics • Post • Progressivism • The Left

‘Prog-Whistles’ and Safe Spaces

Thaddeus G. McCotterBy • in , , , , , ,

The Left controls the three major platforms for messaging the American people—the arts; academia; and the old, new and social media. Yet, America remains a generally center-right country—and certainly has not become the “fundamentally transformed” backwater socialist collective President Obama once promised.

Oh, sure, he and his leftist minions never explicitly called for that; but that’s because words have no meaning, only utility, to the Left. The elasticity of content within their leftist lexicon is no longer matched by their phrasemongering’s efficacy. Succinctly, the country has decoded the Left’s “prog whistles”—and they don’t like what they hear.

In turn, what the Left hears is dissent and opposition to their ideology and aims; and, being the true owners of the moniker “stupid party,” the Left is doing its damnedest to silence it.

Sure, the censorial Leftist ignoramuses doth protest too much. Still . . .

Why else would the Left call its opponents every ad hominem “-ism” in their scurrilous arsenal on all their group-think blogs, broadcasts, and sundry other sites that cater to their free speech-averse caprice and further their crusade to destroy independent thought for the sake of their “greater good”⁠—i.e., an equitable collective of human misery?

Why else would the Left expropriate religious terms for its collectivist cult acolytes, thus diminishing their ability to reason by replacing it with unquestioning secular faith of the self-anointed?

Why else would the Left conjure up “deconstructionism,” where the plain meaning of an author’s words are ignored based upon the reader’s subjective interpretation?

Why else would the Left pimp “narrative” as anything other than what it is⁠—a device for the crafting of fictional works? To deny facts and truths that don’t support their historically failed proposals, the Left refutes the logical fallacy that the number of adherents to a proposition do not validate its truth.

Instead, the Left transmogrifies civic discourse into an exercise in character assassination, whereby a proposition’s verity and/or desirability is determined by which of the dueling subjective “narratives”⁠—“good” progressive versus “evil” conservative, both of which are crafted by the Left—“wins” by muscling its way by hook or by crook into roping 50 percent plus one of the public to agree (or at least acquiesce).

Why else would the Left reject the self-evident verity that every individual is unique and possessed of God-given dignity, intellect, talent, and rights which allow for their pursuit of happiness and potential; and instead subscribe and demand fealty to the racist dogma that the group into which a person is born should dictate what he thinks. Of course, if said thinking doesn’t toe the line of the Left’s group think, they will ominously predict a myriad of detrimental consequences for the dissenter.

Consider this chillingly lucid exposition of this insidious leftist dogma from an official of the federal government:

We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice. If you’re worried about being marginalized and stereotyped, please don’t even show up because we need you to represent that voice.

Yes, why would the Left progressively support the regression of American’s free speech by deeming words and opinions “violence”; supporting the violent neo-brownshirts of Antifa; preventing guest lecturers, speakers and faculty and cordoning off “safe spaces” to be free from challenging opinions on campus; doxxing and demanding the firing of non-leftists in both the public and private spheres; boycotting any and all platforms and their advertisers that allow for opinions not conforming to the Left’s collective delusions; chilling any speech they subjectively deem “offensive”; and on and on and on…?

Why doesn’t the Left welcome a vigorous, civil discourse and debate about the merits of its propositions and proposals?

Or, more bluntly, why does the Left fear the First Amendment?

The truth is self-evident: the Left is intellectually bankrupt.

And they know it.

Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.

Photo Credit: Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

Big Media • Immigration • Post • The Left

WaPo Smears Immigration Reduction Pioneer In Obit

Paul BradfordBy • in , , ,

John Tanton, a pioneer in immigration reduction activism, died last week. He founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Center for Immigration Studies, and other similar groups, as well as pushed legislation that would make English the official language. The Washington Post decided the best way to honor his life would be to smear him.

“John H. Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist who was the architect of a national anti-immigration movement that found expression in the policies of the administration of President Trump and who was labeled by watchdog groups as a thinly veiled white nationalist, died July 16 at a nursing center in Petoskey, Mich. He was 85,” read the opening paragraph of the Post’s obituary.

The obituary by Matt Schudel seemed interested only in airing opinions of Tanton from people who hated him. Schudel repeated the Southern Poverty Law Center’s slander that he was the “puppeteer” of the “anti-immigration movement.” The obit also mentioned that Tanton founded SPLC-designated “hate groups,” which include mainstream organizations such as FAIR and CIS.

Schudel quotes a random Republican saying in 1986 that Tanton’s groups “are a bunch of crazies . . . motivated by xenophobia and probably racism.” It quotes Carl Pope, a former head of the Sierra Club, denouncing him: “The whole idea of people trying to hijack an organization to advance their cause was outrageous,” Pope said in 2006. “And I found many of the things he had said since I had known him deplorable and unconscionable.” (In reality, Pope hijacked the Sierra Club and made it fanatically pro-immigration in order to please one megadonor.)

Tanton came to advocate immigration reduction out of conservationist concerns. He worked with the Sierra Club and other groups for many years before he was deemed a practitioner of “wrongthink” and purged. His immigration reductionism never caught on with the leadership of environmental groups.

It wasn’t just the SPLC and aggravated business-first Republicans who were quoted to trash Tanton.

“It’s sad,” Patrick Burns, former FAIR deputy director, told the Detroit News in 2017. “It’s like a dead cat in a well. It poisons a lot of good water. Tanton has been that cat for 30 years.”

No better way to mark a man’s passing than to evoke the image of a decaying feline corpse.

It is true that the SPLC and other groups have lambasted immigration reduction groups just because of Tanton’s comments. The Post notes that Tanton’s advocacy became controversial in the late 1980s after an internal memo was leaked. The memo asked provocative questions about what would happen if Hispanic immigration was left unchecked. Some of the questions asked in the memo included: “Do ethnic enclaves . . . constitute resegregation? As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion? Why don’t non-Hispanic Whites have a group identity, as do Blacks, Jews, Hispanics?”

The Post published some of these questions to imply Tanton was a thinly veiled white nationalist. Most of the memo concerned itself with the economic and cultural effects of mass Hispanic immigration and how America would be able to assimilate these newcomers. The questions were asked in the spirit of anticipating problems, fostering debate, and finding solutions.

Tanton himself disputed claims he was a racist: “I believe in the melting pot. I don’t care what the pigment in your skin is or the slant of your eyes.”

Besides the memo, the SPLC claimed Tanton was a dangerous extremist because of his private correspondence. The left-wing group trawled through thousands of letters and documents in Tanton’s archives at the University of Michigan to find the most damning statements. They found such offensive comments as this: “I have no doubt that individual minority persons can assimilate to the culture necessary to run an advanced society but if through mass migration, the culture of the homeland is transplanted from Latin America to California, then my guess is we will see the same degree of success with governmental and social institutions that we have seen in Latin America.”

This is hardly a radical position. The SPLC’s desire to uphold these views as proof Tanton was an extremist testifies more to their desperation than to his own beliefs.

Some conservatives have also attacked Tanton but from a different angle. They accuse him of being a eugenicist and an abortion supporter, thereby making the immigration groups he founded of also being eugenicists and abortion supporters. It is true that Tanton supported Planned Parenthood when he focused primarily on conservationist efforts. But his own views are not reflected by the immigration reduction groups. For instance, CIS executive director Mark Krikorian is staunchly pro-life.

And if conservatives got in the business of repudiating any person who was ever pro-abortion, they would have to denounce Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Donald Trump.

Tanton’s legacy should be remembered for his courageous advocacy of immigration reduction and making English the official language. Whatever his unorthodox views, the man ensured that there would be pushback when the swamp wanted another amnesty. His groups were instrumental in stopping amnesty in the Bush and Obama years. The SPLC dubbed FAIR a hate group due to its effectiveness in the 2006 amnesty fight. FAIR’s policies influenced Trump and now shape the Republican Party’s immigration platform. Without Tanton and the groups he founded, America would be in far worse shape today. The crazy ideas of the 2020 Democrats would have been implemented a long time ago.

Tanton was a small-town doctor who decided to make this country a better place. Conservatives may not agree with his conservationism and they certainly would disagree with his support of Planned Parenthood, but they have to respect him as the archetypal concerned citizen. America is great because it allows ordinary citizens to impact our political process.

Tanton should be honored for the good he did. The Washington Post only saw fit to compare him to a dead cat. It’s clear the Post thinks the admonition against speaking ill of the dead applies only when the dead have the “correct” politics.

Photo Credit: Kathryn Scott Osler/The Denver Post via Getty Images

Big Media • Immigration • Post • The Left

WaPo Smears Immigration Reduction Pioneer In Obit

Paul BradfordBy • in , , ,

John Tanton, a pioneer in immigration reduction activism, died last week. He founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Center for Immigration Studies, and other similar groups, as well as pushed legislation that would make English the official language. The Washington Post decided the best way to honor his life would be to smear him.

“John H. Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist who was the architect of a national anti-immigration movement that found expression in the policies of the administration of President Trump and who was labeled by watchdog groups as a thinly veiled white nationalist, died July 16 at a nursing center in Petoskey, Mich. He was 85,” read the opening paragraph of the Post’s obituary.

The obituary by Matt Schudel seemed interested only in airing opinions of Tanton from people who hated him. Schudel repeated the Southern Poverty Law Center’s slander that he was the “puppeteer” of the “anti-immigration movement.” The obit also mentioned that Tanton founded SPLC-designated “hate groups,” which include mainstream organizations such as FAIR and CIS.

Schudel quotes a random Republican saying in 1986 that Tanton’s groups “are a bunch of crazies . . . motivated by xenophobia and probably racism.” It quotes Carl Pope, a former head of the Sierra Club, denouncing him: “The whole idea of people trying to hijack an organization to advance their cause was outrageous,” Pope said in 2006. “And I found many of the things he had said since I had known him deplorable and unconscionable.” (In reality, Pope hijacked the Sierra Club and made it fanatically pro-immigration in order to please one megadonor.)

Tanton came to advocate immigration reduction out of conservationist concerns. He worked with the Sierra Club and other groups for many years before he was deemed a practitioner of “wrongthink” and purged. His immigration reductionism never caught on with the leadership of environmental groups.

It wasn’t just the SPLC and aggravated business-first Republicans who were quoted to trash Tanton.

“It’s sad,” Patrick Burns, former FAIR deputy director, told the Detroit News in 2017. “It’s like a dead cat in a well. It poisons a lot of good water. Tanton has been that cat for 30 years.”

No better way to mark a man’s passing than to evoke the image of a decaying feline corpse.

It is true that the SPLC and other groups have lambasted immigration reduction groups just because of Tanton’s comments. The Post notes that Tanton’s advocacy became controversial in the late 1980s after an internal memo was leaked. The memo asked provocative questions about what would happen if Hispanic immigration was left unchecked. Some of the questions asked in the memo included: “Do ethnic enclaves . . . constitute resegregation? As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion? Why don’t non-Hispanic Whites have a group identity, as do Blacks, Jews, Hispanics?”

The Post published some of these questions to imply Tanton was a thinly veiled white nationalist. Most of the memo concerned itself with the economic and cultural effects of mass Hispanic immigration and how America would be able to assimilate these newcomers. The questions were asked in the spirit of anticipating problems, fostering debate, and finding solutions.

Tanton himself disputed claims he was a racist: “I believe in the melting pot. I don’t care what the pigment in your skin is or the slant of your eyes.”

Besides the memo, the SPLC claimed Tanton was a dangerous extremist because of his private correspondence. The left-wing group trawled through thousands of letters and documents in Tanton’s archives at the University of Michigan to find the most damning statements. They found such offensive comments as this: “I have no doubt that individual minority persons can assimilate to the culture necessary to run an advanced society but if through mass migration, the culture of the homeland is transplanted from Latin America to California, then my guess is we will see the same degree of success with governmental and social institutions that we have seen in Latin America.”

This is hardly a radical position. The SPLC’s desire to uphold these views as proof Tanton was an extremist testifies more to their desperation than to his own beliefs.

Some conservatives have also attacked Tanton but from a different angle. They accuse him of being a eugenicist and an abortion supporter, thereby making the immigration groups he founded of also being eugenicists and abortion supporters. It is true that Tanton supported Planned Parenthood when he focused primarily on conservationist efforts. But his own views are not reflected by the immigration reduction groups. For instance, CIS executive director Mark Krikorian is staunchly pro-life.

And if conservatives got in the business of repudiating any person who was ever pro-abortion, they would have to denounce Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Donald Trump.

Tanton’s legacy should be remembered for his courageous advocacy of immigration reduction and making English the official language. Whatever his unorthodox views, the man ensured that there would be pushback when the swamp wanted another amnesty. His groups were instrumental in stopping amnesty in the Bush and Obama years. The SPLC dubbed FAIR a hate group due to its effectiveness in the 2006 amnesty fight. FAIR’s policies influenced Trump and now shape the Republican Party’s immigration platform. Without Tanton and the groups he founded, America would be in far worse shape today. The crazy ideas of the 2020 Democrats would have been implemented a long time ago.

Tanton was a small-town doctor who decided to make this country a better place. Conservatives may not agree with his conservationism and they certainly would disagree with his support of Planned Parenthood, but they have to respect him as the archetypal concerned citizen. America is great because it allows ordinary citizens to impact our political process.

Tanton should be honored for the good he did. The Washington Post only saw fit to compare him to a dead cat. It’s clear the Post thinks the admonition against speaking ill of the dead applies only when the dead have the “correct” politics.

Photo Credit: Kathryn Scott Osler/The Denver Post via Getty Images

America • Center for American Greatness • Foreign Policy • Identity Politics • Immigration • Post • The Left

Ilhan Omar Blames America for Illegal Immigration

Brandon J. WeichertBy • in , , , , , ,

Radical Somali-American and left-wing Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) argues that U.S. foreign policy is the cause of the global refugee crisis. Without question, excessive aggression from the United States in Latin America and the Middle East has exacerbated the pre-existing pathologies that pervade their political, social, and economic systems. 

Whether America made some unique contribution to these horrors, however, is an open question. Still, in this way, Omar has stumbled her way into an undeniable truth: U.S. foreign policy is too aggressive far too often, and it has caused some disruptions—and this leads to some unwanted migration.

Very often, migrants are seeking entry into the United States or Europe not out of an urgent need for safety, but for easy access to generous welfare systems and jobs. As a result, migrants tend to amass a good deal of money that they can then remit back to their families in their homelands. The fact that neither Europe nor the United States require true assimilation of these migrants into the larger culture makes migration even more attractive since the migrants will get money and protection without having to abandon their own cultures.

The longer the West tolerates this flocking of “refugees” in ever larger numbers and does not require them to assimilate, the more reverse-assimilation becomes likely. 

Already migrants in Europe and the United States are offered legal protections that few native-born citizens are offered. A faux sense of cultural sensitivity enforced by the “elites” of their host governments, causes them to go out of their way to make people who have no intention of returning the favor feel comfortable. 

It explains why in the United States, Spanish is no longer viewed as a second language but as a language to be respected as co-equal to the language of the land (and, in certain parts of the country, the lingua franca). It’s also why some European governments are willing to abandon their own free speech laws in order to placate violent Muslim migrants who become offended by cartoons that depict their religious prophet, Mohammed. 

Foreign Policy Plays a Role
There is little doubt that incessant bombings of the Middle East or an endless cavalcade of covert U.S. action directed against disliked governments in Latin America can cause instability which, in turn, can create mass migration. But Omar and her socialist Suicide Squad in Congress are attempting to craft a rather languid U.S. foreign policy in response—one that undoubtedly entails the United States turning the other cheek in response to each terrorist provocation or kneeling before a tinpot, Latin American Communist dictator (a lá Barack Obama’s approach). 

This is not the appropriate response to previous missteps and it will not even ameliorate the illegal immigration problem. And, beating our warplanes into plowshares or bringing all the troops home from the Greater Middle East tomorrow—as gratifying as that may be—will not prevent the flood of refugees and migrants into Europe either. These moves would likely make us weaker while not addressing the real problem of our current immigration policies. In fact, it’s galling to hear Omar and her comrades suggest they want to fix the ongoing immigration crisis given that they disagree with the suggestion that mass migration is even a problem! Forgive me for not trusting their solution to a problem they don’t see as a problem.

It’s Immigration Policy, Not Foreign Policy
When Omar and her fellow members of the socialist Suicide Squad argue that U.S. foreign policy is the cause of the present immigration crisis, they are not being serious. Instead, they are using these claims to distract Americans and deflect attention away from the fact that the type of lax immigration policies they support are the real cause of the present immigration crises, both in Europe and the United States. After all, Ilhan Omar is a proponent of the status quo for U.S. immigration policies. Like so many of her fellow “democratic-socialists” in the United States, she likely looks with favor on Europe’s current open borders immigration policies. 

In the United States, these open borders immigration policies have damaged many of the communities that supported Donald Trump. Similar concerns are spurring nationalist-populist movements that are destabilizing the European Union. So long as the borders of the United States and Europe remain open for anyone to walk through, we will not see any semblance of general stability, security, or sustainable prosperity in the West. The longer this paradigm persists, the less hope there will be for the West to survive in its present form.

They Hate You, Folks . . .
Make no mistake: destroying the West in its present form is precisely the intent of the socialist Suicide Squad.

Whatever kernel of truth there may be in Omar’s criticism of the past excesses of U.S. foreign policy, it is not the cause of our immigration crisis. Omar is deliberately misleading people when she makes such claims. By appealing to the general unpopularity of U.S. foreign policy (unpopular everywhere but within Washington, D.C., of course)  Omar avoids having to address the uncomfortable realities of mass migration which are really to blame for the current crisis. 

More dastardly, though, is the fact that Omar is essentially scapegoating the American people; in effect, blaming the victims of illegal immigration, for the problem of illegal immigration. The only people responsible for illegal immigration are the bureaucrats who allow for it to occur, the business leaders who encourage it, and the migrants themselves who benefit from it. 

Until President Trump not only builds his wall but gets Congress on board with a complete revision of every aspect of U.S. immigration policy, the United States will continue to decline in disturbingly similar ways that Europe has declined. 

Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.

Photo credit: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

Center for American Greatness • Democrats • Great America • Identity Politics • Post • The Culture • The Left

Sorting Out the New Color Wheel

Anthony EsolenBy • in , , , , , ,

A young man from the marshes, name of Pip, has unexpectedly and from some unnamed source come into “great expectations,” so he makes his way to London to acquire some modest education fit for the gentleman that he is to be. There he meets his tutor, Mr. Pocket, and his wife, Mrs. Pocket. They have quite a few children, who are not brought up, but rather “tumbled up,” because Mrs. Pocket cannot be bothered to attend to them. She is always absorbed in a book about the English peerage.

“I found out within a few hours,” says Pip, “that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody’s determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives—the Sovereign’s, the Prime Minister’s, the Lord Chancellor’s, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s, anybody’s—and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact.” And so she grew up “as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who has to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge.”

Such is the magic of the right kind of blood. Mrs. Pocket would have been at home among the genealogical precisians of the old American South, sorting people into correct divisions according to the percentage of negro or native blood in their veins, quadroons or octoroons as the case might be. In Sewanee, that bit of Creole might disqualify you for entry into the University of the South. I don’t know. In America today, a family legend that a thrice-great-uncle was or may have been part cigar store Indian wins you some points for enrollment at Harvard.

Ms. Pocket, and her allies Ms. Paqit, Ms. Phakat, and Ms. Octavia-Pequeta, might also be at home in the United States Congress. Donald Trump has suggested, in his boorish way, that the four self-designated members of “the squad,” newly elected congresswomen whose attitude toward the United States seems to range from contempt to hatred, should go back to the countries whence they came, fix them, and return to show us how it is done. I will not comment on the specifics of their quarrel. I note only that the president has been criticized for attacking “women of color.”

For the life of me, I do not know what that designation means. It cannot denote race—whatever that means. One of the women is African American. Two are Semitic Caucasians, and one is an Iberian Caucasian. Does it denote color in the old sense, the melanin content in the skin? Is that how low we have sunk?

I want to know specifically what the hues are on the new color wheel. A married couple emigrate from Spain to Mexico, and their children emigrate to the United States. Do they count as people of color? What about people who come to New York from Madrid without a stop at Guadalajara? Do they count?

A Spanish man marries a woman in Cuba whose grandfather was part Seminole. Do their children count? What about my friend in Cape Breton, a French Canadian who has a Mikmak ancestor? Does he count? What about his children?

The French and the native Indians often intermarried, ever since the early conversion of the great sachem Membertou to Christianity. Do French Canadians in general count, then? Or is Spain more colorful than France? Or perhaps darker-skinned Indians count more than do the lighter-skinned Indians of the north?

Do Portuguese Catholics from Lisbon count, if they have dark complexions and some Moorish blood? Do Portuguese Catholics from São Paulo count, if they have light complexions and no Guarani blood? What of the Moors and people from the Maghreb? Does a Berber with red hair count? Berbers speak a language that is neither Indo-European nor Semitic, though they are mostly Muslim in religion and Caucasian in physical features.

What about Iranians? Do they count? They speak a language that is Indo-European, and though they are also mostly Muslim, they come from a people as ancient as the Greeks—from a people who intermarried with those Greeks, and with Assyrians, Medes, Lydians, Hebrews, and many others. Would the last shah of Iran count?

Do Jews in Israel count? They are Semitic, like the Arabs, and speak a Semitic language, like the Copts and the Somalis. Do they not count if their skin is too light?

Do Turks count? They are Caucasian in appearance, but they come from eastern and central Asia, and their language, like that of the Berbers, is neither Indo-European nor Semitic. I am darker skinned than most Turks. Do Armenians count? They too are darker than the Turks, but they are largely Christian, and they do speak a language in the Indo-European family. Do Armenians win an extra point because they were the victims of a genocidal massacre perpetrated by the Turks?

Do Cossacks count—or rather Kazakhs? If they come from Kazakhstan, does that count for more than if they come from Moscow or Warsaw? If the Kazakh blood has been long mingled with Slavic blood, will it be too diluted to count? Do any Russians count? Do Russians count if they come from the far east and have Mongol blood? Does the mayor of Irkutsk count? Where do Laplanders fall, with some Mongol blood and mixed Mongol and European features?

Does a dark Caucasian from the Punjab count? If he speaks Bengali and reads Sanskrit, languages both related to English, and he is a Roman Catholic, does that count for less than if he were a Jain or a Sikh? The Maltese are Roman Catholic, situated between Europe and Africa, speaking an African language written in the Roman alphabet. Do they count? Would their shade be darker if they wrote in Arabic cursive? If they were Muslim?

I would lay $1,000 even money that you cannot tell a Maltese man from a Sicilian. In fact, you would be hard put to tell a Tunisian from a Sicilian. Do Sicilians count? Someone of Southern Italian heritage, as I am, no doubt has blood in his veins that comes from every group that invaded the island over the centuries: French, Spanish, Viking, Albanian, Greek, and Moorish. Are we “white”? What about the Ainu from the northernmost island of Japan?

At which a sane person would throw up his hands in despair and cry out, “What is all this nonsense for?”

Precisely.

Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.

Photo Credit: iStock/Getty Images

Center for American Greatness • Post • Progressivism • The Courts • The Left

Answering the Left’s Campaign to Delegitimize the Courts

Deion A. KathawaBy • in , , , ,

Elie Mystal—an Above the Law windbag—mercifully has taken a break from comparing Republicans to Nazis and blogging cringey clickbait about seminude Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz to shriek instead about how President Trump and Senate Republicans are “pack[ing] the courts with ultraconservatives.”

In a rambling screed at The Nation, Mystal frets about some dark fruit that has been produced by President Trump’s “illegal reign,” namely, “far-right legal arsonists” have helped install, at last count, 123 “torture advocates, LGBTQ antagonists, rape apologists, Islamophobes, . . . Confederate-monument defenders [and] anti-abortion fundamentalists” to the federal bench—with more on the way.

Mystal’s rhetorical drive-by—the piece attacks all current Trump judges but focuses especially on the “worst of the worst,” ominously dubbed the “Seven Injustices”—is but the latest salvo in a months-long progressive campaign to delegitimize the federal courts, particularly the Supreme Court.

Because if progressives don’t own it, it’s illegitimate, of course.

As usual, the Right is blind to an emerging political and cultural trend and so is doing nothing to mobilize an effective political response. If history is any guide, if the Right ever does respond, it will be ineffectually —too little too late—and all that will remain is to write the think pieces lamenting how unfair it all is.

Failure to act now promises dire consequences: the nullification of a key success of the Trump Administration—confirming life-tenured, rule-of-law, textualist-originalist jurists to the federal judiciary—and the further erosion of the integrity of our constitutional republic.

Always Political
At the behest of their radical base, which is deeply disillusioned with Article III of the Constitution now that the courts are no longer reliable agents of History, many Democratic presidential candidates have offered various plans to “fix” the Supreme Court, and sundry pundits and intellectuals regularly concern-troll about the court’s legitimacy.

Here’s what is really going on: This is a political hatchet job to delegitimize the federal courts because they are not all-but-guaranteed to ratify the radical agenda of the progressive, social-justice Left: green fanaticism, Marxist deconstructionism (of late, that of sex and gender), multiculturalism, anti-Americanism through political correctness and social media-sponsored censorship, and socialism.

But the problem is not that politicians, pundits, and parts of the broader public are attacking the courts politically in an attempt to steer their rulings in a direction more palatable to their broader agenda; ’twas ever thus. The problem is the Right is sitting on its hands, apparently unaware that the progressives’ ferocious assault demands a response.

The courts are inescapably subject to politics because they are, by design, subject to the political branches—“advice and consent” on the front end and (theoretically) impeachment on the back end. And the members of those political branches, in turn, are accountable, ultimately, to the sovereign American people—from whom all legitimate government must derive its authority.

A few examples will suffice to show that the judiciary is not some pure haven of legal analysis and that judicial politics has been part of American political life since the Founding:

  • Congress has twice in our history passed jurisdiction-stripping legislation in response to judicial decisions that it disfavored: one revoking the Supreme Court’s appellate review of a habeas corpus decision in the aftermath of the Civil War (Ex parte McArdle) and a second restricting the power of inferior federal courts to issue injunctions in labor disputes (Lauf v. E.G. Shinner & Co.);
  • After Marbury v. Madison, the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans enacted legislation that prevented the Supreme Court from meeting for over a year and abolished the nationwide circuit court system set up by the Federalists during their last days in office (thus throwing Federalist-appointed judges out of office)—and the Supreme Court upheld that latter piece of legislation, even though it resulted in life-tenured judges’ losing their seats;
  • After the Supreme Court handed down its decision in McCulloch v. Maryland, Chief Justice John Marshall anonymously responded via out-of-court newspaper articles to the pointed, ideological attacks of two anonymous state-court judges, who had penned their own extrajudicial writings;
  • Part of the 1860 presidential campaign featured attacks on the Supreme Court (which had issued its disgraceful Dred Scott decision in 1857), and after Abraham Lincoln’s election, leading papers such as the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times supported plans to limit the independence of the judiciary;
  • “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards dotted the landscape in the 1950s and ’60s in an attempt to pressure the Warren Court to back away from its nonoriginalist judicial activism, and, arguably, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s threatened 1937 court-packing plan was successful in pressuring the Supreme Court to lay supine before the implementation of the New Deal.

What we’re seeing from Democrats nowadays is just more of the same: a series of political attacks that must be met with a political response.

But that response will have to come from the political branches and right-leaning media, as well as those who generally support President Trump’s judicial nominees, because we cannot expect judges in today’s system to defend themselves. What Marshall did post-McCulloch was a highly unusual maneuver from an exceptionally gifted jurist and political operative, during a different era in history.

As Hamilton wrote in Federalist 78, “The judiciary . . . has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever.” Judges rely on public support and the protection of the political branches for their power and legitimacy; if we do nothing to defend Article III against this barrage, its power will be fatally undermined—and we will all be the worse for it.

The Founders were originalists, but the Progressive Era fomented a jurisprudential revolt in constitutional interpretation, a revolt that wrongly spurned the role of originalism, textualism, popular sovereignty, and the natural law in the interpretive enterprise. The courts as President Trump and Senate Republicans are molding them are good and worth defending to the hilt, and the Right should not be afraid to engage in full-throated political defense of them, even in the face of a Left that, in its delusional way of thinking, posits that the judiciary is its own exclusive property.

We’ve known for decades now that as the courts go, so goes the country—for better and for worse. It’s time we start acting like it.

Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.

Photo Credit: Erik McGregor/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

Democrats • Donald Trump • Post • The Left

Can the Mod Squad Beat the Odd Squad?

Curtis EllisBy • in , , ,

Can anyone stop “the squad”?

That’s the question gripping the Democratic Party.

The four radical House freshmen who call themselves “the squad” push cultural Marxism, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and watermelon socialism—green on the outside, red on the inside.

The media gives the quartet the star treatment, dutifully amplifying their every utterance. Their party’s presidential contenders treat them with deference, adopting the squad’s radical positions, for the most part, uncritically as their own.

Party leaders cling to the hope that eventually, just as day follows night and candidates who run to the left in the primary run to the center in the general, the moderates will rein in the crazies. Don’t worry about all those nutty plans, they’ll never happen.

But the belief in a “great moderate hope” is misplaced. The Mod Squad can’t beat the Odd Squad.

And as for the Green New Deal being merely “aspirational,” as self-styled moderate presidential candidate Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) called it, one need look no further than California to see those “aspirations” being implemented today.

As Berkeley Goes . . . ?
The Berkeley City Council recently voted unanimously to ban gas stoves, gas grills and gas water heaters in all new buildings. The ordinance further stipulates that should Sacramento adopt even more stringent energy codes, Berkeley will automatically bring city codes into compliance. So much for home rule.

This is a first step in the long march to “decarbonize the economy,” proponents say. The liberal haven has a climate action plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 33 percent by next year and 80 percent by 2050. The city is committed to using 100 percent renewable electricity by 2035.

A fossil fuel ban and the centralization of authority are key features of the Green New Deal. And as this dispatch from the front line in Berkeley shows, it is not an “aspirational” mirage.

It is happening now.

East of Berkeley, over Altamont Pass, you find the Central Valley of California, a basin between the Coastal Range and the Sierra Nevada, 400 miles long and 60 miles wide. With rich soil, 300 days of sunshine, a mild climate, and four growing seasons, the valley boasts some of the best farmland in the world.

Beginning in the 1930s the federal government ensured a reliable supply of water for the valley. Over the next four decades, Washington built the Central Valley Project, a system of reservoirs to capture snowmelt from the high Sierra and a lacework of aqueducts and canals that turned this desert into “the food basket of the world.”

Washington’s attitude toward waterworks changed in the 1970s. President Jimmy Carter drew up a “hit list” of 19 federal water projects, fulfilling a campaign promise to environmentalists and abandoning his party’s once-solid support for massive public works and western water infrastructure.

The greens’ growing influence in the Democratic Party gave wildlife and wild rivers precedence over reservoirs and reclamation. Water management now means diverting dam water from farms to fish and eliminating dams altogether, including the one that provides San Francisco with water and electricity.

Across the Central Valley, signs reading “Growing food is not wasting water” and “Dam water grows food” sprout in dry fields where fruits and vegetables once grew.

Meanwhile, state air-quality regulators fine farmers for using pumps powered by natural gas, even though it’s the cleanest burning fuel available. How do they expect us to grow food? the farmers ask.

From the Party of Workers to the Party of Coastal Elites
The “decarbonization of the economy” is of a piece with the deindustrialization of America.

Deindustrialization destroyed blue-collar jobs; decarbonization will make blue-collar Americans pay more for energy and everything it goes into—food, manufactured goods, and transportation. In every instance, the working class pays for the policy preferences of the upper class.

This coincides with the Democrat Party’s transformation from the party of working people to the party of the professional elites.

The New Left college radicals who took over the party after 1968 ousted the old union guys from party posts and “campus issues” of gender, race, and environmentalism replaced the “bread and butter” issues that had been the party’s center of gravity.

It is, of course, possible to ameliorate the impact of climate change without a socialist revolution. So why is a government takeover of vast swathes of the economy the preferred solution proposed by one of our two major parties?

Can moderates in that party rein in the extremists?

James Burnham provides the answer in his seminal 1964 book on liberalism, Suicide of the West.

Burnham tells us liberals are incapable of criticizing or opposing anyone or anything to their left.

The French summed up the progressive’s attitude: il n’y a pas d’enemi a gauche—”there is no enemy to the left.”

Liberalism is of the Left, and shares with the Left’s more extreme elements common views on secularism, reform, and social change. That cripples the genuine liberal’s ability to mount a full-throated opposition to the extremists:

As the liberal sees it, some persons on the Left are doubtless mistaken in some of their views … but the liberal feels instinctively that their “intentions” are good, that they are aiming at the right goals. . . . [T]hey have the correct ideals and goals, but their methods are wrong.

You can almost imagine Nancy saying these exact words to her aides about the squad.

There’s a reason the squad constantly reminds us they are “women of color.” According to the rules of identity politics, all “persons of color” are to be treated always as “oppressed.”

The liberal is paralyzed by a “feeling of guilt toward the poor and oppressed, who gain an immunity from the moral condemnation that is reserved for the powerful and privileged and for himself,” Burnham writes. When “the poor and oppressed are deployed among the contingents of the Left . . . the liberal’s automatic sympathy with them . . . reinforces his strategic impulse to stand with them.”

This “automatic sympathy with” and “strategic impulse to stand with” the left of the Left means the discussion between the moderate-left and further-left will always be what degree of socialism will we have. “No socialism” is not a choice.

Nancy Pelosi and the “moderates” are constitutionally incapable of standing up to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley.

The Mod Squad can’t stop the Odd Squad. Only President Donald J. Trump can do that.

Photo Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images

First Amendment • Free Speech • Post • Silicon Valley • Technology • The Left • The Media

America, Google, and Me: My Senate Speech

Dennis PragerBy • in , , , , , ,

Last week, at the invitation of Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), I spoke to the Senate Judiciary Committee about Google’s having placed more than 60 Prager University videos on its restricted list. Any family that filters out pornography and violence cannot see those particular videos on YouTube (which is owned by Google); nor can any school or library.

This statement is as much about what PragerU and I stand for as it is about Google. Those interested in viewing the presentation can do so here:

It is an honor to be invited to speak in the United States Senate. But I wish I were not so honored. Because the subject of this hearing—Google and YouTube’s (and for that matter, Twitter and Facebook’s) suppression of internet content on ideological grounds—threatens the future of America more than any external enemy.

In fact, never in American history has there been as strong a threat to freedom of speech as there is today.

Before addressing this, however, I think it important that you know a bit about me and the organization I co-founded, Prager University—PragerU, as it often referred to.

I was born in Brooklyn, New York. My late father, Max Prager, was a CPA and an Orthodox Jew who volunteered to serve in the U.S. Navy at the start of World War II. My father’s senior class thesis at the City College of New York was on anti-Semitism in America. Yet, despite his keen awareness of the subject, he believed that Jews living in America were the luckiest Jews to have ever lived.

He was right. Having taught Jewish history at Brooklyn College, written a book on anti-Semitism and fought Jew-hatred my whole life, I thank God for living in America.

It breaks my heart that a vast number of young Americans have not only not been taught how lucky they are to be Americans but have been taught either how unlucky they are or how ashamed they should be.

It breaks my heart for them because contempt for one’s country leaves a terrible hole in one’s soul and because ungrateful people always become unhappy and angry people.

And it breaks my heart for America because no good country can survive when its people have contempt for it.

I have been communicating this appreciation of America for 35 years as a radio talk show host, the last 20 in national syndication with the Salem Radio Network—an organization that is a blessing in American life. One reason I started PragerU was to communicate America’s moral purpose and moral achievements, both to young Americans and to young people around the world. With a billion views a year, and with more than half of the viewers under age 35, PragerU has achieved some success.

My philosophy of life is easily summarized: God wants us to be good. Period. God without goodness is fanaticism and goodness without God will not long endure. Everything I and PragerU do emanates from belief in the importance of being a good person. That some label us extreme or “haters” only reflects on the character and the broken moral compass of those making such accusations. They are the haters and extremists.

PragerU releases a five-minute video every week. Our presenters include three former prime ministers, four Pulitzer Prize winners, liberals, conservatives, gays, blacks, Latinos, atheists, believers, Jews, Christians, Muslims and professors and scientists from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and a dozen other universities.

Do you think the secretary-general of NATO; or the former prime ministers of Norway, Canada or Spain; or the late Charles Krauthammer; or Philip Hamburger, distinguished professor of law at Columbia Law School, would make a video for an extreme or hate-filled site? The idea is not only preposterous; it is a smear.

Yet, Google, which owns YouTube, has restricted access to 56 of our 320 five-minute videos and to other videos we produce. “Restricted” means families that have a filter to avoid pornography and violence cannot see that video. It also means that no school or library can show that video.

Google has even restricted access to a video on the Ten Commandments . . . Yes, the Ten Commandments!

We have repeatedly asked Google why our videos are restricted. No explanation is ever given.

But of course, we know why: because they come from a conservative perspective.

Liberals and conservatives differ on many issues. But they have always agreed that free speech must be preserved. While the left has never supported free speech, liberals always have. I, therefore, appeal to liberals to join us in fighting on behalf of America’s crowning glory: free speech. Otherwise, I promise you, one day you will say, “First they came after conservatives, and I said nothing. And then they came after me. And there was no one left to speak up for me.”

Thank you.

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