My predecessor [as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee], Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.
Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party — she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. . . .
The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt. . . .
Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt — $15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign — and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance. . . .
There’s a lot more where that came from. This is devastating beyond words. Everybody’s talking about how Brazile has confirmed the suspicion of Bernie Sanders that the Democrat primary process was basically rigged for Hillary, but the larger revelations are even worse:
Democrats have been squandering their donors’ money in much the same way they routinely squander taxpayers’ money;
The triumph of Obama’s two-term presidency, which should have yielded a fund-raising windfall for the DNC, instead left the party more than $20 million in debt;
and
The DNC’s indebtedness was exploited by the Clinton campaign to defraud Democrat primary voters.
It was this perception of a rigged nomination process that made Trump’s “Crooked Hillary” charge resonate with working-class voters in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. And so the corruption of the Democrat Party — profligate spending, irresponsible management and insider favoritism at DNC headquarters — was a major cause of their devastating defeat last year. These revelations confirm the suspicions that a lot of grassroots Democrats have had all along, and will make the party’s recovery a very difficult prospect. If an appealing left-wing third-party candidate emerges before 2020, that might be R.I.P. for Democrats.
Employees within the Democratic National Committee are looking for new employees in the Technology Department. However, the DNC is apparently not interested in your resume if you happen to be a white male.
In an email issued to DNC insiders on Monday, Data Services manager Madeleine Leader announced that the Technology Department is looking to fill several positions and asked interested parties to forward the openings to their colleagues.
She included the following caveat:
I personally would prefer that you not forward to cisgender straight white males, since they’re already in the majority. . . .
After the latest scandals to plague the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential election, the new leadership under Tom Perez and Keith Ellison (D-MN) seek to rebrand the party as a more inclusive and welcoming community. Unfortunately, this email doesn’t exactly help their case.
A new ad for the Virginia governor race shows a man in a truck with a Gillespie sticker and Confederate flag on it, chasing minority children who are running for their lives. Gillespie is the Republican candidate.
What’s being implied in the ad is clear. The driver of the truck is a white Republican man who is trying to kill minority children by running them down.
This screen cap from the ad shows the back of the truck chasing the children. Note the Confederate flag, Gillespie sticker and “Don’t Tread on Me” license plate.
Democrats should be ashamed of themselves, but if they had any sense of shame, they wouldn’t be Democrats, would they?
Lauren Duca is not very good at logical inferences, and her belief that the exposure of Harvey Weinstein provides a road map to “take down the patriarchy” is delusional, primarily because “patriarchy” itself is a paranoid conspiracy theory, a persecution fantasy. What are the “structures and institutions” by which “male power and female subordination” are sustained and recreated, how does one “take down” that system by “storytelling” and, most importantly, what will be the result if feminism’s destructive agenda succeeds? What “structures” and “institutions” will replace those that feminists destroy?
Nearly half a century has passed since the radical Women’s Liberation Movement emerged in the late 1960s. Why is it that Harvey Weinstein — an avowed “progressive” and a major donor to Hillary Clinton and other Democrats — got away with preying on young women for decades?
“I would be happy to give [Bill Clinton] a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their Presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”
— Nina Burleigh, 1998
Feminists are trapped in an abusive relationship with the Democrat Party, and the Hollywood establishment is part of the same political machine. So long as Harvey Weinstein was useful to Democrats, his predatory behavior was ignored by the “operatives with bylines” in the media. Da Tech Guy is almost certainly correct that if Hillary had won in 2016, Weinstein would not have been exposed in 2017.
Isn’t the Democrat Party a structure and an institution? Hasn’t male power in the Democrat Party been sustained by feminists’ voluntary subordination to the party’s agenda? If Hillary Clinton was willing to tolerate Harvey Weinstein’s behavior, in the same way she tolerated her own husband’s behavior, what does this tell us about the corrupt bargain between feminists and Democrats? Is it true — or was it true 20 years ago — that women owe a debt of gratitude to Democrats for “keeping abortion legal” and “keeping the theocracy off our backs”?
While we’re asking questions, how about this one: Why did Bill Clinton take 26 flights on a private plane dubbed “The Lolita Express,” which “was reportedly outfitted with a bed where passengers had group sex with young girls”? The owner of that plane, Jeffrey Epstein, was convicted and sent to prison “for solicitation and procurement of minors for prostitution. He allegedly had a team of traffickers who procured girls as young as 12 to service his friends on ‘Orgy Island,’ an estate on Epstein’s 72-acre island, called Little St. James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.”
If Lauren Duca wants to engage in “storytelling,” why isn’t she telling any stories about Bill Clinton’s travels aboard “The Lolita Express”?
Feminists like Lauren Duca aren’t very good at logical inferences, however. Their partisan loyalty to Democrats leads them to conflate the “patriarchy” — their delusional idée fixe — with the Republican Party. Believing that legal abortion is the summum bonum of public policy, and that the GOP represents the forces of “theocracy” which would criminalize abortion, feminists believe that women’s “progress” is synonymous with the success of the Democrat Party.
Like an anti-Semite muttering about “Zionists,” the feminist who sees herself (and all women) oppressed by “patriarchy” has abandoned facts and logic for the sake of a simplistic theory that offers her a demonized scapegoat as an all-purpose explanation for her problems. The essential message of American feminism can be expressed as a syllogism:
Men are evil;
Abortion is good;
and therefore
Vote Democrat!
Am I the only one who understands why this is a formula for madness? If feminists believe that electing Democrats is the solution to their problems, perhaps they should ask the families of the 53 women shot to death in Chicago this year what electing Democrats has done for them. Hillary Clinton got 75% of the vote in the Democrat fiefdom of Cook County, Illinois, and former Clinton/Obama staffer Rahm Emanuel is mayor of Chicago, one of the most dangerous places in America.
Police say the fatal shooting of 25-year-old Pleasure Cardell Singleton Jr. was a case of self-defense, and the woman who shot him will not be charged.
The woman shot Singleton after he stabbed her multiple times . . . in a domestic fight in his West Side Lawndale neighborhood home, Chicago Police said.
About 4:05 p.m. Oct. 5, Singleton, a father of three, was shot in the chest after he stabbed the 25-year-old woman multiple times in the 4000 block of West 21st Street, police said.
The woman was taken in serious condition to Mount Sinai Hospital, and Singleton was pronounced dead at the scene at 4:48 p.m., authorities said.
Perhaps “storytelling” can “take down the patriarchy,” as Lauren Duca says, but a bullet through the chest is also quite effective. However, it seems that feminists are not interested in telling stories about the daily death toll in Chicago, just as they weren’t interested in telling stories about Harvey Weinstein’s predatory behavior until after Hillary — a beneficiary of Weinstein’s support — lost the presidential election.
1998: Gwyneth Paltrow, Hillary Clinton and Harvey Weinstein.
2017: Huma Abedin, Harvey Weinstein and Hillary Clinton.
Harvey Weinstein’s behavior was an “open secret” in Hollywood for decades. Where was Lauren Duca’s feminist “storytelling” all those years? Why wasn’t it necessary to “take down the patriarchy” when Bill Clinton was assaulting Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, et al.?
“Rape culture is a complex set of beliefs that encourage male sexual aggression and supports violence against women. It is a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent. In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as the norm.”
— Emilie Buchwald, Transforming a Rape Culture, 1994
Does Harvey Weinstein believe violence is sexy? Isn’t it true that Bill Clinton engaged in behavior within the “continuum” of sexual violence? Hasn’t the feminist strategy of “Vote Democrat” helped foster the climate of “physical and emotional terrorism against women”? And why have feminists like Lauren Duca been unwilling to engage in “storytelling” if it might undermine the political interests of the Democrat Party?
At the celebration, Planned Parenthood awarded former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton the Champion of the Century Award. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Weinstein gave Clinton a standing ovation at the event where she insisted on the “morality” of “reproductive health care” (aka abortion) and stressed “trusting and valuing women.” . . .
According to Artnet editor Sarah Cascone, Weinstein also purchased artwork by British painter Cecily Brown at a charity auction at the gala for $100,000. . . .
According to Planned Parenthood’s most recently published annual report, the organization performed 328,348 abortions and received $554.6 million in “government health services grants and reimbursements” for the year 2015-2016.
Hillary Clinton on Tuesday said she was “shocked and appalled” in the wake of sexual harassment allegations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, speaking publicly for the first time about the longtime Democratic donor five days after it first emerged that multiple women had accused him of harassment over the course of decades.
“I was shocked and appalled by the revelations about Harvey Weinstein,” Clinton said in a statement. “Their courage and support of others is critical in helping to stop this kind of behavior.”
A high-profile donor in the Democratic Party, Weinstein has contributed more $20,000 to Clinton’s campaigns since she ran for U.S. Senate in New York in 1999, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Last week, the New York Times, in a powerful report by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, revealed multiple allegations of sexual harassment against Weinstein, a story that led to the resignation of four members of his company’s all-male board, and to Weinstein’s firing from the company.
The story, however, is more complex, and there is more to know and to understand. In the course of a ten-month investigation, I was told by thirteen women that, between the nineteen-nineties and 2015, Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them, allegations that corroborate and overlap with the Times’ revelations, and also include far more serious claims.
Three women — among them [actress Asia] Argento and a former aspiring actress named Lucia Evans — told me that Weinstein raped them, allegations that include Weinstein forcibly performing or receiving oral sex and forcing vaginal sex. Four women said that they experienced unwanted touching that could be classified as an assault. In an audio recording captured during a New York Police Department sting operation in 2015 and made public here for the first time, Weinstein admits to groping a Filipina-Italian model named Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, describing it as behavior he is “used to.” Four of the women I interviewed cited encounters in which Weinstein exposed himself or masturbated in front of them.
When Gwyneth Paltrow was 22 years old, she got a role that would take her from actress to star: The film producer Harvey Weinstein hired her for the lead in the Jane Austen adaptation “Emma.” Before shooting began, he summoned her to his suite at the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for a work meeting that began uneventfully.
It ended with Mr. Weinstein placing his hands on her and suggesting they head to the bedroom for massages, she said. . . .
Rosanna Arquette, a star of “Pulp Fiction,” has a similar account of Mr. Weinstein’s behavior, as does Judith Godrèche, a leading French actress. So does Angelina Jolie, who said that during the release of “Playing by Heart” in the late 1990s, he made unwanted advances on her in a hotel room, which she rejected.
Are there any women in Hollywood that Harvey Weinstein didn’t harass? But never mind, liberals are shocked, shocked:
Academy Award winner George Clooney, who was given his first major big-screen role by Harvey Weinstein, has become the latest — and most high-profile — member of Hollywood to speak out on the alleged sexual-misconduct allegations against his sometime employer.
“It’s indefensible. That’s the only word you can start with,” he says. “Harvey’s admitted to it, and it’s indefensible. I’ve known Harvey for 20 years. He gave me my first big break as an actor in films on From Dusk Till Dawn, he gave me my first big break as a director with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. We’ve had dinners, we’ve been on location together, we’ve had arguments. But I can tell you that I’ve never seen any of this behavior — ever.” . . .
Weinstein, the former co-chief of Miramax, has since been fired from The Weinstein Company—which he co-founded with his brother Bob—and many of the male actors and filmmakers in particular who have benefited from the studio executive’s Oscar Midas touch, from Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (Good Will Hunting) to Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction), have remained alarmingly silent.
Harvey Weinstein in 1997 (left); Ashley Judd in Kiss the Girls (right.
In 1997, 29-year-old Ashley Judd was one of Hollywood’s hottest young actresses, and 45-year-old Harvey Weinstein was one of the most powerful movie producers in the world. His company, Miramax Films, had been bought by Disney for $60 million in 1993, and the company’s film The English Patient had won the 1997 Oscar for Best Picture. Photos from the 1997 Oscar party show Weinstein standing next to Judd holding her hand, while her date, Vince Vaughn, hovers in the background.
At the time, Judd was working on Kiss the Girls, a detective thriller for Paramount, and Weinstein was very eager to work with her, IYKWIMAITYD. “I was sexually harassed by one of our industry’s most famous, admired-slash-reviled bosses,” Judd told Variety in a 2015 interview which did not name Weinstein as the boss in question:
I was making “Kiss the Girls” at the time, and here I was, a declared feminist. I had completed a minor in what was then called women’s studies, which we now call gender studies. And yet I did not recognize at the time what was happening to me. It took years before I could evaluate that incident and realize that there was something incredibly wrong and illegal about it. . . .
When I kept saying no to everything, there was a huge asymmetry of power and control in that room.
This will be familiar to all the women to whom this has happened. . . .
The ultimate thing when I was weaseling out of everything else was, “Will you watch me take a shower?” And all the other women, sitting around this table with me, said, “Oh my god — that’s what he said to me too.” In that moment, I told him something like, “When I win an Academy Award in one of your movies.” He said, “No, when you get nominated.” I said, “No, no, when I win an Academy Award.” That was a small moment of power when I was able to contradict him and hold to my reality. And then I got out of there. And by the way, I’ve never been offered a movie by that studio. Ever.
You can read the whole thing. What did it mean, in 1997, for Ashley Judd to be “a declared feminist”? If you’re old enough to remember the 1990s, you know that this meant primarily (a) commitment to defending the abortion industry and (b) fanatical devotion to the Democrat Party. After the Lewinsky scandal made headlines in 1998, feminist Nina Burleigh declared: “I would be happy to give [Bill Clinton] a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their Presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.” The “theocracy,” you see, is liberal codespeak for the Republican Party’s Christian conservative constituency, which opposes abortion. And this was the kind of feminism that Ashley Judd embraced as a young actress in the 1990s.
Well, guess what? Harvey Weinstein is down for that agenda, too.
May 2017: Harvey Weinstein and his wife at the 100th Anniversary Gala for Planned Parenthood pic.twitter.com/cGOG0IRBov
If you’ve ever read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, you understand how easily some people can be deceived and manipulated by advocates for trendy political causes. There is a line in Animal House, where the Deltas are on their way to pick up girls at a liberal women’s college:
FLOUNDER: I hear Dickinson girls are fast. What should l say?
OTTER: Just mention modern art, civil rights or folk music, and you’re in like Flynn.
It’s the same thing with feminists and abortion. Ann Coulter once observed that abortion is the holy sacrament of the Church of Liberalism, and this total commitment to promoting abortion has been profoundly harmful to the Democrat Party. Anyone with a shred of human decency knows that abortion is wrong, and the Democrats’ pro-abortion stance has the effect of driving decent people away from their party, while simultaneously attracting dangerous perverts to the party.
Say what you will, it was obviously no accident that Democrat Anthony Weiner was married to Hillary Clinton’s assistant Huma Abedin. The Clintons have always surrounded themselves with corrupt and immoral people, because no honest or moral person would support them — at least, not once they realized who the Clintons really are. It is always better to be an enemy of such people than to be their allies. Christopher Hitchens famously chronicled Bill Clinton’s betrayals of his liberal supporters in a book aptly titled, No One Left to Lie To.
Does anyone really believe, as Harvey Weinstein said, that support for the abortion industry is synonymous with “women’s rights”?
Cui bono? Who actually benefits from the abortion industry’s grisly trade? Isn’t it true that the main effect of legalized abortion, and the Contraceptive Culture in general, is to enable irresponsible men to pursue hedonistic sexual activity without being bothered by the potential burden of caring for children? And how is it in the best interest of women to be treated as “pump-and-dump” sexual commodities?
What we know of Weiner’s latest shame is that, in the wake of his 2011 scandal, the married Democrat began an online correspondence with an Indiana girl, identified by BuzzFeed as Sydney Leathers, who says she worked on President Obama’s re-election campaign. To give you an idea of Ms. Leather’s partisan and ideological commitments, after a maniac’s shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona, she created an online petition that blamed this deadly crime on Sarah Palin, whom Ms. Leathers condemned for “inciting violence.” (In fact, the Tucson gunman was a schizophrenic inspired by a leftwing conspiracy “documentary.”) Only a liberal girl could admire a creep like Weiner.
Being the pro-abortion party makes Democrats so profoundly immoral that we are scarcely surprised by their dishonesty, corruption and scandalous personal misconduct. And, with a nod toward some of my #NeverTrump Republican friends, this is also a danger to the GOP. The degradation of public morality, in which Democrats have been enthusiastically complicit, has not been without it harmful effects on Republicans. Confronted by a corrupt Democrat machine (including their dishonest party “operatives with bylines” in the media), some in the GOP figure they can play by the same rules. If Democrats were willing to defend Bill Clinton, who was plausibly accused of rape, after all, how can they condemn Donald Trump’s boorish behavior? And so the blatant immorality of Democrats tends to erode moral standards among Republicans as well. This danger cannot be ignored.
The fate of Democrats in recent years should be a warning to any Republican who is tempted to emulate them. Whatever selfish gains the Clintons derived from their corruption has come at a painful cost to the Democrat Party’s political influence, as I recently explained:
Democrats have lost power at every level, as Republicans not only control the White House and both houses of Congress, but also hold the governorships of 33 states, and 68 of 99 state legislative chambers. In 32 states, which are home to 61% of the U.S. population, the GOP controls both houses of the state legislature. Hillary Clinton’s supporters like to point out she won the popular vote, with 66 million votes to Trump’s 63 million, yet nearly a quarter of her total — more than 16 million votes — were concentrated in just three states: California, New York and Illinois. Lacking effective leadership, Democrats have become deranged and desperate, and are being attracted to lunatic fringe movements.
Of course, it is possible — likely, even — that an anti-Trump backlash will reduce some of that GOP advantage in next month’s off-year elections, but the long-term trend over the past 25 years will probably continue: No matter how much Democrats increase their margins in big cities and the coastal states, these gains are more than offset by Republican gains among suburban and rural Middle American voters. Consider these three data points from Wisconsin exit polls:
“Family values” still matter. When push comes to shove, marriage and religion are decisive influences in electoral politics. When we look at these factors in Wisconsin — a state that Trump won by a narrow margin — the only demographic groups that went for Clinton were (a) unmarried women and (b) those who never attend religious services.
Once you begin extrapolating from those data points — and if you understand the selection effects involved — you see why the pro-abortion feminism of Ashley Judd must ultimately be fatal to the Democrats.
Ashley Judd doesn’t have any children. Indeed, if you look at the four women featured on the cover of Ms. magazine in 2003 — “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like” — you find that two of them (Camryn Manheim and Whoopi Goldberg) have one child each, while Judd and Margaret Cho have zero, so that their average is 0.5 children per woman. Because feminist ideology is anti-marriage, anti-motherhood and anti-religion, the Democrat Party’s embrace of feminism creates a long-term problem for the party. And the rising feminist resentment toward hypocritical male “allies” like Harvey Weinstein will only exacerbate this problem.
There was a time when liberal feminism attracted males whose idea of “women’s rights” were similar to Weinstein’s, but in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s feminist-themed campaign, an angry anti-male radicalism has taken hold among women on the Left. The “male feminist” type of left-wing man is now openly mocked and scorned for his attempts to get laid by spewing talking-points about women’s “empowerment,” etc.
If a young man is interested in politics, is there any reason he should support a Democrat Party controlled by enraged man-hating feminists? After the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016, which ought to have been seen as a lesson in why feminism fails, Democrats are instead doubling down. They are talking about nominating Sen. Kamala Harris in 2020, reinforcing the message that men are no longer welcome in the Democrat Party. Taking a look at exit polls in Ohio — where Trump won male voters by a 23-point margin — it’s clear that this message is already well understood, the same way the “Black Lives Matter” movement made clear that Democrats are against white people. All signs indicate that the Democrat Party’s agenda will become even more extreme, as they embrace the radical “Resistance” movement. And who can forget Ashley Judd’s “Nasty Woman” rant at the Women’s March on Washington?
Yes — that is what a feminist looks like, and that’s also what the future of the Democrat Party looks like, if they have a future at all.
An investigation by The New York Times found previously undisclosed allegations against Mr. Weinstein stretching over nearly three decades, documented through interviews with current and former employees and film industry workers, as well as legal records, emails and internal documents from the businesses he has run, Miramax and the Weinstein Company. . . .
During that time, after being confronted with allegations including sexual harassment and unwanted physical contact, Mr. Weinstein has reached at least eight settlements with women, according to two company officials speaking on the condition of anonymity. Among the recipients, The Times found, were a young assistant in New York in 1990, an actress in 1997, an assistant in London in 1998, an Italian model in 2015 and Ms. O’Connor shortly after, according to records and those familiar with the agreements. . . .
Democrats help Democrats, you see. In his response to the allegations, Weinstein says: “I came of age in the 60’s and 70’s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different. That was the culture then.” Ann Althouse calls this the “Roman Polanski excuse.”
As Ace of Spades remarks, many people in the media must have known about Weinstein’s (alleged) misbehavior, but he’s a Hollywood big shot and a liberal, so they didn’t blow the whistle on him — the same way they covered for Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Anthony Weiner.
Well, the Clinton era is over, and it’s not the 1960s anymore and, amid the current climate of feminist jihad, Democrats are going to find it more difficult to get away with their customary shenanigans.
ADDENDUM: Permit me to note, in regard to Weinstein’s defense that he “came of age in the 60’s and 70’s,” that he seems to have made a made a mistake common among high-profile sexual harassers, i.e., he stayed in the game too long. Back when Weinstein was a young man promoting rock concerts in the 1970s, yeah, “all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different.” There were basically no rules at all in the world of rock music back then, nor were there any such rules in Hollywood when Weinstein started making movies. But the main problem is that Harvey Weinstein kept chasing skirts when he was in his 40s and 50s, and even as recently as 2015, he was reportedly still at it.
Guys, don’t do this. At age 45 or 50, you may want to believe you’ve still got it, but you don’t. No matter how much success you had with the ladies when you were 20 or 25, you’re going to look ridiculous if you’re still trying to play the same game when you reach your 40s.
UPDATE: Rebecca Traister of New York magazine recounts her own confrontation with Weinstein’s violent abusive behavior — her called her an epithet and shoved her boyfriend down the steps at a party in 2000. She tries to explain why Weinstein’s behavior was never previously reported, including the fact that “there were so many journalists on his payroll, working as consultants on movie projects, or screenwriters, or for his magazine.” Talk magazine, with Tina Brown as editor, was published 1999-2002: “The cover story of the debut issue was an interview with Hillary Clinton.” In less than three years, Talk lost an estimated $50 million. This was simply another aspect of Weinstein’s power. He was willing to throw away money on a slick magazine with a big-name editor in order to buy influence among journalists. And guess what? It worked. Contrary to their own smug opinions of themselves, the journalistic elite aren’t the most ethical people on the planet.
Like other Democrats who have rejected democracy, Ms. Heidewald was inspired by Mrs. Clinton’s defeat to declare Donald Trump “Not My President,” and create a YouTube program “Resistance News Network.”
Ms. Heidewald denounces Republicans as “fascists” and, after the 2016 election, she created an organization called The Rose Resistance“to fight fascism and white supremacy” and “help protect the people most endangered by the Trump regime.” Ms. Heidewald claims to stand for “democracy” when, in fact, she advocates a one-party dictatorship by her rhetoric that delegitimizes Republicans. She seems to believe, and seeks to persuade others, that the 63 million Americans who voted to elect Donald Trump should have no right to be represented in government.
This rhetoric of “progressive” intolerance (reflecting the influence of Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School) is the antithesis of democracy. It is therefore not surprising to see Ms. Eichenwald with an anti-Trump poster from the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP).
Those readers who recall my coverage of the 2016 Republican National Convention will remember that the anti-police protesters in Cleveland waved RCP posters that declared “America Was Never Great.”
“There will be no peace unless there is justice,” Professor Cornell West said Tuesday in a speech to an anti-police rally here organized by the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). Speaking through a megaphone amid a crowd of protesters gathered at Public Square in downtown Cleveland, West invoked “the legacy of white supremacy in this country that goes back 400 years” to condemn police.
West spoke in front of a giant RCP banner declaring, “Time to Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution. STOP MURDER BY POLICE.” Activists with the RCP held aloft signs that read, “America Was NEVER Great! We Need to OVERTHROW This System!”
The RCP, which advocates the “overthrow” of the American “system,” is a Maoist cult founded by Bob Avakian. The RCP became notorious in the 1980s when it called for the assassination of Ronald Reagan. The RCP and its front group Refuse Fascism have recently made headlines by announcing nationwide protests to “end the Trump/Pence Regime”:
Antifa is planning a new round of nationwide riots on November 4 as part of a plot to start a “civil war” that will lead to the overthrow of the Trump administration.
Far-left militants plan to “gather in the streets and public squares of cities and towns across this country” in the hope of building momentum for civil unrest that leads to nothing less than domestic regime change.
“Our protest must grow day after day and night after night—thousands becoming hundreds of thousands, and then millions—determined to act to put a stop to the grave danger that the Trump/Pence Regime poses to the world by demanding that this whole regime be removed from power,” states a call to action on the RefuseFascism website.
A longer screed posted on the Revolutionary Communist website makes it clear that Antifa is not prepared to wait for electoral change from Democrats, and will engage in a “ferocious struggle,” based on plans outlined in a book written by Bob Avakian, the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, which is called The Coming Civil War.
This extremist rhetoric — denying the legitimacy of a constitutionally elected government by denouncing it as a “regime” of fascism, white supremacy, etc. — is not merely divisive, it is dangerous, especially when accompanied by militant talk of “struggle” and “revolution.”
The RCP’s advocacy of “civil war” is not idle chatter. We have seen in the past three years how the Democrat-supported racial terrorist movement Black Lives Matter incited violent riots in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charlotte, and sparked assassinations of police officers. Not surprisingly, Erika Heidewald is a big fan of Black Lives Matter.
This endorsement of Black Lives Matter, like her embrace of the RCP, puts Erika Heidewald on the extreme fringe of American politics. However, this L.A.-based lesbian feminist actually represents the mainstream of young Democrats who have internalized the identity-politics ideology of their party in the post-Obama era. The irrationality of her rhetoric — including her claim that the only alternative to identity politics is “white male supremacy” — reflects the crisis of a party that is intellectually bankrupt and at a historic low ebb of influence.
Democrats have lost power at every level, as Republicans not only control the White House and both houses of Congress, but also hold the governorships of 33 states, and 68 of 99 state legislative chambers. In 32 states, which are home to 61% of the U.S. population, the GOP controls both houses of the state legislature. Hillary Clinton’s supporters like to point out she won the popular vote, with 66 million votes to Trump’s 63 million, yet nearly a quarter of her total — more than 16 million votes — were concentrated in just three states: California, New York and Illinois. Lacking effective leadership, Democrats have become deranged and desperate, and are being attracted to lunatic fringe movements.
“This is basically how fascism works,” Hoberman says. “It’s shock and awe. It’s the big lie. It’s doing things so absurd that no one knows how to react. It’s impossible to keep track of what they’re doing and how they’re driving us all crazy.” . . .
“They’re playing with utter destruction and it’s completely unconscionable to let it go on.” . . .
“Calls to impeach and take back the House and Senate are fine, and we support all that. But ultimately we don’t think anything will fix this but mass action by huge amounts of people gumming things up.
“This is just too serious to continue with business as usual.”
“They’re driving us all crazy.”
Hillary Clinton got 71% of the vote in Los Angeles County, and yet this was absolutely irrelevant to the outcome of the election. Liberals are politically isolated in their urban enclaves, ranting about “white supremacy” and “fascism” because too many voters in places like Iowa, Wisconsin and Michigan are sick and tired of being lectured by Hollywood elitists, university professors, and CNN talking heads.
In the GOP primaries, Ted Cruz was the main candidate of the Christian Right, who did not approve of Trump’s offensive language and behavior. Nevertheless, when it came to a choice between Trump and Hillary Clinton, conservative Christians knew which side they were on. If they didn’t, Hillary’s campaign reminded them.
The Cultural Left was empowered by Obama’s presidency, to the detriment of the Democrat Party’s appeal to mainstream Americans. As the Democrats have become more beholden to the far-left fringe, they have alienated the kind of middle-class voters who might not be “right wing,” but who damned sure aren’t going to vote for a Democrat Party that looks increasingly like the cast of the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Erika Heidewald probably doesn’t realize that gay Republicans played a key role in launching Donald Trump as a presidential candidate. The group GOProud invited Donald Trump to speak at CPAC in 2011, and my late friend Andrew Breitbart threw a party for them:
Also exciting to many attendees was the prospect of Thursday night’s GOProud party at 18th Street Lounge with Big Government publisher Andrew Breitbart, featuring ’90s alt rock performer Sophie B. Hawkins. More than 500 guests are expected at the event, according to organizers.
Breitbart, a Los Angeles conservative, reached out to GOProud about throwing the party for them as a way of welcoming gays and lesbians to the conservative conference.
“This party will highlight the story the main stream media has missed in the weeks leading up to CPAC, namely that the vast majority of the conservative movement is united and welcomes GOProud and any other conservative into the fold,” said Breitbart, who also recently joined GOProud’s Advisory Council, announcing the event in early February.
Yeah, I was at that party. Despite my status as a member of the heteropatriarchy, effective coalition politics in a two-party system requires a broad-based movement to win a majority in a diverse nation of 330 million people. To quote former GOP chairman Haley Barbour, “My old boss Ronald Reagan used to say, ‘Somebody who agrees with me 80 percent of the time is a friend and ally, not a 20 percent traitor.’”
Of course, in the 2012 GOP primaries, I ended up supporting Rick Santorum, the antithesis of GOProud, who was unfortunately defeated by the establishment candidate, Mitt Romney. Now, I hate establishment Republicans and consider Mormonism a cult, but that didn’t stop me from going all-in once Mormon Mitt locked up the GOP nomination.
Erika Heidewald is a young Democrat and a fool, but I repeat myself. Perhaps some day she will grow up, get tired of hanging around with losers, and decide instead to help Make America Great Again.
Democrats: "We're going to continue our strategy of demonizing white males, because that's really worked so well for us lately." pic.twitter.com/PJgOV2XJPS
‘Antifa’ radicals terrorized Madison Faupel at the University of Minnesota.
Minnesota is one of the least “diverse” states in America — 85% white, with single-digit percentages of minorities: 6% black, 5% Hispanic, 4% Asian. You probably wouldn’t expect too much from Minnesota in the way of militant racial activism, except that it’s a bastion of liberalism. Both of the state’s U.S. Senators are Democrats, as are six of its eight U.S. Representatives. Bernie Sanders won the Democrat caucuses in Minnesota last year, and Hillary Clinton won the state in November. In the Trump Age, therefore, racial strife is to be expected in Minnesota and especially in the identity-politics bastions of academia:
[Madison Faupel is] the president of the University of Minnesota’s College Republican chapter. Her group sparked controversy last fall when it reserved space and painted a mural on the Washington Avenue Bridge to promote their student group.
Her group settled on three slogans: “College Republicans, The Best Party on Campus,” “Trump Pence 2016,” and “Build the Wall.”
Within an hour, the panels had been vandalized, and protesters had surrounded the panels. Some of the vandalism included the following statements: “STOP WHITE SUPREMACY NOW” and “Hate Speech is not Free Speech.” . . .
As the protests grew, so did violent threats against the College Republicans and Madison, in particular. The group’s members were scared for their safety on campus. Madison and the rest of the executive board didn’t go out at night and tried to never be alone on campus. Many used campus security to walk home. . . .
The University of Minnesota did call for a “Campus Climate” conversation about the recent controversial events, but this, too, devolved into chaos. About 15 minutes into the event, more than 200 protesters came into the room chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, racism has got to go,” surrounding those students who had come to the event to engage in a civil conversation.
The protesters took over the stage as the student body president stood at the front of the room with her fist in the air, leading the chants. Students took turns lamenting how their feelings were hurt, how writing “Build the Wall” amounts to hate speech, and how they want to be included in conversations on campus. At the end of the event, one of the protesters stood on stage and asked the crowd if any College Republicans had attended. Madison stood up and raised her hand.
When the “event” ended, she was swarmed by the mob. “They were completely surrounding me; I was unable to leave the event. They were screaming in my face calling me racist, xenophobic, and other unmentionable names. They were aggressive, and I just wanted to get out safely,” said Madison. “One girl was holding another girl back saying, ‘She’s not worth it. Don’t hit her.’” . . .
Members of the loosely organized far-left militant group Antifa targeted [Faupel] for promoting capitalism on campus, posting online her address, phone number, parent’s address, parent’s phone number, a photo of her, and a reference to her as an alt-right Nazi.
“I endured a lot of violent threats throughout the year, but Antifa’s attack was the scariest,” said Madison. “When I was out in public I received messages that they were watching me, that they would continue to come after me until I stopped my ‘leadership of bigotry and hate,’ and that they were ‘on my ass.’ I was very scared to be home because they knew where I lived, but I was also scared to be in public because they claimed they were watching me.”
The university’s student body president, Abeer Syedah, is a self-described “brown queer angry feminist” who hates capitalism, Christianity, heterosexuals and white people, not necessarily in that order.
Abeer Syedah promotes hatred at University of Minnesota.
“[The LGBT] community is the target of horrific hate crime, a massacre, in a space that’s supposed to be safe for the queer community during a month that’s supposed to be about the queer community, in a society that remains violently cisnormative and heteronormative . . .
“[The Muslim] community exhausted spending this month practicing patience and gratitude, is prepared to defend their peaceful lifestyle and beliefs in justice, love, and equality, from the scapegoating and fearmongering of a largely Christian-normative and white supremacist base that pretends it’s not hateful while picking the xenophobic, bigoted, racist, misogynistic, ableist, queerphobic, Islamophobic, whiny bully of the decade as their desired nominee for President.
Did anyone at the University of Minnesota discipline Abeer Syedah for these hateful, libelous accusations? Of course not. The university’s administrators are all Democrats who support her radical agenda.
Abeer Syedah describes herself as a ‘brown queer angry feminist.’
The totalitarians in charge of our nation’s universities promote “diversity,” as long as it doesn’t include Republicans. As Matt Lewis’s article makes clear, the Democrat faculty and administration at the University of Minnesota encouraged the radical hate-mongers who terrorized Madison Faupel and other Republican students.
Maybe the taxpayers in Minnesota are OK with funding universities that have become indoctrination centers for extremism. Or maybe Minnesota taxpayers have never been asked to contemplate the consequences of paying professors to teach hatred in the name of “social justice.”
