Category: Democrats

Exactly How Did @BenShapiro Become Berkeley’s ‘Kazika the Mad Jap’?

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“As conservative radio host Ben Shapiro spoke at the University of California Berkeley, protesters swarmed outside chanting various slogans. . . . Berkeley police said there were no reported injuries due to violence and no reports of any damage to property Thursday, as the crowd swelled to nearly 1,000 people.”
— CNN

Probably none of those Berkeley protesters would get the headline allusion to Hunter S. Thompson. Even if you explained it to them, they’d still be offended, because college students are offended by pretty much everything nowadays. Last night’s speech by Ben Shapiro didn’t provoke a riot in Berkeley, and some people are probably disappointed, considering the intensity of headline hype that preceded the event.

Berkeley braces for visit
by right-wing speaker Ben Shapiro
The University of California, Berkeley will seal off large parts of its campus like a fortress with a closed perimeter and a “very large” visible police presence Thursday, when the birthplace of America’s free speech movement faces its next potential clashes.
City and campus authorities anticipate demonstrations at a speech by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor, and are preparing for possible violence with a variety of new strategies and tightened security.
For the first time in two decades, officers will be armed with pepper spray after the city council modified a 1997 ban at an emergency meeting this week.
The tactics to boost security are the latest indication of growing frustrations in Berkeley and other liberal cities that have become targets of violent political protests since the election of President Donald Trump and battlegrounds for extremist groups that support and oppose him.
“We have seen extremists on the left and right in our city,” said Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin, a Democrat who backed the police request to use pepper spray. “We need to make sure violence is not allowed.”

This reminded me of the wrestling hype HST wrote in his youth:

There was a time, about ten years ago, when I could write like Grantland Rice. Not necessarily because I believed all that sporty bullshit, but because sportswriting was the only thing I could do that anybody was willing to pay for. And none of the people I wrote about seemed to give a hoot in hell what kind of lunatic gibberish I wrote about them, just as long as it moved. They wanted Action, Color, Speed, Violence…. At one point, in Florida, I was writing variations on the same demented themes for three competing papers at the same time, under three different names. I was a sports columnist for one paper in the morning, sports editor for another in the afternoon, and at night I worked for a pro wrestling promoter, writing incredibly twisted “press releases” that I would plant, the next day, in both papers.
It was a wonderful gig, in retrospect, and at times I wish I could go back to it — just punch a big hatpin through my frontal lobes and maybe regain that happy lost innocence that enabled me to write, without the slightest twinge of conscience, things like: “The entire Fort Walton Beach police force is gripped in a state of fear this week; all leaves have been canceled and Chief Bloor is said to be drilling his men for an Emergency Alert situation on Friday and Saturday nights — because those are the nights when ‘Kazika, The Mad Jap,’ a 440-pound sadist from the vile slums of Hiroshima, is scheduled to make his first — and no doubt his last — appearance in Fish-head Auditorium. Local wrestling impressario Lionel Olay is known to have spoken privately with Chief Bloor, urging him to have ‘every available officer’ on duty at ringside this weekend, because of the Mad Jap’s legendary temper and his invariably savage reaction to racial insults. Last week, in Detroit, Kazika ran amok and tore the spleens out of three ringside spectators, one of whom allegedly called him a ‘yellow devil.’”
“Kazika,” as I recall, was a big, half-bright Cuban who once played third-string tackle for Florida State University in Tallahassee, about 100 miles away — but on the fish-head circuit he had no trouble passing for a dangerous Jap strangler, and I soon learned that pro wrestling fans don’t give a f–k anyway.

Indeed, and like pro wrestling fans on the fish-head circuit, the naive young “progressives” at Berkeley don’t care whether Ben Shapiro is actually a “far-right” personality or not. He once worked for Breitbart, and because Breitbart is connected to Trump (via Steve Bannon), the Antifa dimwits figure Shapiro must be a dangerous white supremacist.

Or maybe they just don’t give a f–k whether this is true or not.

What matters to the Left, and to their cheerleaders in media, is the myth that Republicans are the suit-and-tie facade of a “far-right” movement determined to turn America into a vast concentration camp, a dystopia where everybody who doesn’t conform to some Eisenhower-era model of bourgeois suburban respectability lives in a state of perpetual fear.

This is a paranoid delusion. Even in the (alleged) Bad Old Days of “McCarthyism,” there were still plenty of beatniks, socialists, homosexuals and dope-addled jazz musicians living in urban bohemian enclaves like Greenwich Village and, of course, Berkeley. (Roger Kimball’s book The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America is the best introduction to the beatnik-era counterculture.) Because the Left now controls both the education establishment and the journalism industry, however, the Eisenhower era has been re-imagined as the Dark Night of Fascism in America, to which the “right-wing” extremists are forever scheming to return us — and they certainly will, if you don’t VOTE DEMOCRAT!

It’s really that simple.

All the fish-head circuit wrestling hype portraying Ben Shapiro as a Dangerous Right-Wing Menace is inspired by the crude partisanship of Democrat operatives with bylines, who wake up every morning, have a cup of coffee, then go to work making up lies about Republicans.

If only the demonized right-wingers would do something to justify all this fear-mongering! Ben Shapiro running amok, tearing the spleens out of ringside spectators who called him a “Zionist dog” — now that would be a spectacle worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra security required to protect Shapiro in Berkeley. However, like the former Florida State tackle billed as a “dangerous Jap strangler,” Shapiro is scarcely the menace the Berkeley leftists imagine him to be. The paranoid fear-based ideology of the Left requires symbolic enemies who can serve as the focus of their hatred, and any conservative who comes within their field of vision will do. Shapiro turned it right back on them:

“Thanks to antifa and the supposed anti-fascist brigade for exposing what the radical left truly is,” Shapiro said in his speech, referring to anti-fascist, or “antifa,” activists.
“All of America is watching because you guys are so stupid. It’s horrifying, I am grateful, and you can all go to hell, you pathetic, lying, stupid jackasses,” he said.
Shapiro noted that campus officials had said increased security measures had cost the school more than $600,000.
“That is not due to me, it’s due to the antifa, hard-left morons who are out there breaking windows,” he said. . . .
Shapiro slammed protesters who had previously rioted when right-wing speakers visited the famously liberal campus and who had put up signs and posters condemning his speech Thursday, while praising law enforcement.
“These are the folks that stand between civilization and lawlessness,” Shapiro said of the police, saying “the only people who are standing between those ATMs and the antifa are the police, and all they get from the left is a bunch of crap.”

In the Trump Age, hyped-up fears of “fascism” and “white supremacy” lead to ridiculous behavior and rhetoric from the Left. Shapiro didn’t even vote for Donald Trump, and is against the so-called “alt-right.”

Facts don’t matter to Democrats. Their cult mentality (and liberal media bias) insulates them from reality. Obama’s presidency was, for them, an eight-year vacation which they expected to continue under Hillary. When Trump unexpectedly won, Democrats surrendered to Fear and Loathing, and their nightmare delusions of a Nazi revival are so deranged that they can imagine Ben Shapiro as Hitler in a yarmulke.



 

 

 

Hillary’s Delusional Reading of Classics

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Everyone is stunned by the self-deceptions and blame-shifting in Hillary Clinton’s campaign memoir What Happened, and Ace of Spades aggregates several of the most mind-blowing excerpts.

Most notably, as British socialist writer James Heartfield observes, Hillary claims that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is about the importance of trusting “our leaders, the press, experts” — a 180-degree reversal of Orwell’s actual meaning. A free society requires a citizenry distrustful of power, and not predisposed to accept whatever beliefs officially-approved “experts” advocate. Independent minds must be skeptical, for example, of the suggestion that we should reorganize our healthcare system according to what “leaders” and “experts” tell us.

Only her arrogance — imagining herself as the expert leader who deserves our unquestioning trust — could lead Hillary to reverse the lesson of a classic anti-totalitarian novel like Nineteen Eighty-Four.

However, Hillary also misinterprets Eric Hoffer’s 1951 classic The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. This is a book that I have repeatedly recommended as a guide to understanding the kind of people who are attracted to radical ideologies like feminism:

. . . especially Part 2 (“Potential Converts”) and sections IV (“The Role of the Undesirables in Human Affairs”) and VI (“Misfits”). What Hoffer writes about the influence of “the inferior elements in a nation” (p. 24) and the “incurably frustrated” who have “an unfulfilled craving for creative work” (p 47) applies to many of the angry young men and unhappy young women who rush to join the mob of disgruntled “progressives.”

Being familiar with Hoffer’s ideas — The True Believer is sitting on my desk even now — it was mind-boggling to read Hillary’s warped view:

During the campaign, Bill and I both went back and reread The True Believer, Eric Hoffer’s 1951 explanation of the psychology behind fanaticism and mass movements, and I shared it with my senior staff. On the campaign trail, I offered ideas that I believed would address many of the underlying causes of discontent and help make life better for all Americans. But I couldn’t — and wouldn’t — compete to stoke people’s rage and resentment. I think that’s dangerous. It helps leaders who want to take advantage of that rage to hurt people rather than help them. Besides, it’s just not how I’m wired.

Really? A campaign that denounced Republican voters as “deplorables,” led by a candidate who promised among other things to destroy the jobs of coal miners (helping “make life better,” you see), who irresponsibly incited a phony campus “rape culture” hysteria and endorsed the racial violence of “Black Lives Matters,” was not about stoking rage?

It is easy to condemn the populism of Donald Trump (or Bernie Sanders) as a demagogic appeal to ressentiment, but populism flourishes only because elites are out of touch with the needs and interests of ordinary Americans. This is true in both Democrat and Republican parties, but because the educational system and the news media are both controlled by Democrat partisans, it is possible for someone like Hillary Clinton to exist within a liberal bubble where the grievances expressed by the populist Left seem legitimate in a way that the grievances of the populist Right do not. When she was sharing Eric Hoffer’s book “with my senior staff,” did Hillary ever suggest that its critique of fanaticism applied to them or to her own supporters? Isn’t it true that Hillary had her own True Believers, and that the Clinton campaign sought to harness the mentality of a “mass movement” — #ImWithHer — to win the election?

“Inside a cult, the only people who matter are Us, and your identity as one of Us requires you to buy into whatever ideology defines the cult. If you are not willing to constantly prove your loyalty to Us, you might be exiled and ostracized from the cult, becoming one of Them — and this, to the cult member, is a fate worse than death.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, May 19, 2016

There was always a creepy totalitarian vibe surrounding the Hillary campaign, including a paranoid mentality that has expressed itself, since the election, as a search for scapegoats (“Bernie bros”) and conspiracies (Russian hackers) to explain how it was that The Maximum Leader was wrongly deprived of the victory she deserved. Indeed, one could invoke the works of Orwell and Hoffer to analyze the 2016 campaign, but the lessons are not flattering to Hillary. “SJWs Always Project,” as Vox Day says, and Hillary’s psychological projections are illustrative of What Happened, and more importantly Why It Happened.

 

 

Democrats: The Atheist Anti-American Feminist Gun-Grabber Man-Hating Party

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Far be it from me to offer helpful advice to Democrats. The sooner the Democrat Party implodes from its internal contradictions, the better off America and the world will be, as far as I’m concerned. And so I probably shouldn’t point out that being the anti-Jesus party isn’t going to help the Democrats any more than their being the anti-capitalist party, or the anti-male party, or the anti-white party, or . . .

 

Shannon Watts a/k/a Shannon Troughton is a Democrat who started “Moms Demand Action,” an anti-Second Amendment group funded by New York multibillionaire Michael Bloomberg. She is a leading practitioner of the Democrat strategy of demonizing gun owners, using the propaganda slogan “Disarm Hate” to promote the idea that every gun owner is a sexist racist homophobe. In other words, Democrats advocate gun-control laws as a means of disarming white heterosexual males.

 

Obviously, this rhetoric didn’t help Hillary Clinton win over white working-class voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or Iowa. It’s almost as if voters don’t enjoy being scapegoated or something. But having built an identity-politics coalition around paranoid hatred — blaming all the world’s woes on demonized “right-wing” scapegoats — the Democrats can’t seem to find any other arguments in the Trump era.

So today I noticed the #NashvilleStatement hashtag was trending on Twitter, and when I clicked over, I saw this:

 

Well, what was this about? A group of evangelical Christian leaders had issued a statement affirming that they still believe what they have always believed, and in particular rejecting the liberal demand for compulsory approval of homosexuality and transgenderism:

“The Nashville Statement is an urgently needed moment of gospel clarity,” stated [Coalition for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood] President Denny Burk. “In a culture nearly defined by sexual confusion and brokenness, the church of Jesus Christ has to proclaim with one voice that God’s good design for gender, marriage, and sexuality.” . . .
Top Evangelicals leaders within the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination representing over 47,000 Baptist churches across the United States, signed the statement.
Other major signatories include Anglican pastor and apologist Sam Alberry, popular author and pastor Francis Chan, Charisma Media’s founder and CEO, Steven Strang, and Asbury Theologian’s Visiting Distinguished Professor of Old Testament John N. Oswalt.

Question: What does this theological statement have to do with Shannon Watts’ pet issue of gun control?
Answer: Nothing at all.

Except, of course, she’s a Democrat, so she had to drag her lesbian daughter into the argument to tell us what we already knew, that Democrats aren’t just anti-Second Amendment, but also anti-First Amendment, seeking to prevent Christians from teaching what the Bible says. Democrats consider it “hate speech” to quote Genesis or Deuteronomy or Romans or any other passage of the Bible that could be cited by those who disapprove of homosexual behavior.

Democrats like Shannon Watts promote the idea that Bible-believing Christians are a greater threat to America than Koran-believing Muslims. Why? Because exit-poll data show that Bible-believing Christians tend to vote Republican, just like a majority of gun owners vote Republican, and most white people vote Republican. If you are a member of any demographic constituency that is aligned with the GOP, Democrats will find a way to demonize you as the epitome of evil, because scapegoating their enemies is what the Democrat Party is all about.

By the way, is anyone surprised that Shannon Watts’ daughter is gay? Aren’t Democrats now basically the anti-heterosexual party? America is still a free country, and you can say what you want, but they can take away my heterosexuality when they pry it from my cold dead hands.

Probably most Americans agree with me, but Democrats hate most Americans. They are fanatically devoted to hating us, and yet can’t seem to understand why we don’t vote for them. Let’s hope they never figure it out, because this is why Hillary Clinton is not president.



 

 

Things Clueless White People Say: @Plutoburns and the Patriarchy

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Pardon my use of “clueless” in the headline, but various other adjectives were considered and rejected as possibly offensive. It’s important for the reader to understand that @Plutoburns, the person talking about “women invested in the patriarchy,” is a white male who produces a lame (and little-watched) YouTube series about Japanese cartoons and other such nerdy topics. It’s also important to know that the conversation that led to this weird remark began with transgender pornographer Zachary Antolak a/k/a “Zinnia Jones” a/k/a “Santana Kennedy” making an all-out defense of Hillary Clinton:

 

Let’s pause, reader, to consider what it says about our politics in 2017 that the most ardent admirer of Hillary Clinton is “Zinnia Jones.”

This is how you get more Trump.

The coalition constructed by the Democrat Party can’t win an election because it is organized to attract kooks, freaks, losers and weirdos, and is therefore unpalatable to decent, normal people. Columbia University Professor Mark Lilla, a liberal Democrat, has tried to talk sense to his party about their identity politics problem, but they won’t listen:

The reaction of liberals to Lilla’s book has been overwhelmingly negative, which may simply suggest how deeply the rot of identity politics has penetrated his political comrades in arms.
Predictably, the New York Times finds Lilla’s analysis thoroughly distasteful, and published a review by Yale University History Professor Beverly Gage that dismissed Lilla’s critique as “trolling disguised as erudition.”
Writing in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Columbia law professor Katherine Franke went further still, comparing Lilla to David Duke, the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Identity politics is the disease, and Trump is either a symptom of that disease or an attempted treatment, depending on your perspective.

Trying to win elections by claiming that people who don’t vote for you are racist sexist homophobes is a good way to lose an election.

At any rate, when Zachary/“Zinnia” asserted that Hillary Clinton “did nothing wrong” in her campaign, and that people who voted against Clinton owed her an apology, this unleashed a firestorm of criticism, mostly from leftists who had voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democrat primaries, and who detest Clinton as an “establishment” politician. “Zinnia” was accused of a “cultist” mentality for treating Clinton as “infallible.” Then “Zinnia” declared “I relate to her immensely. How do people look at her and not see themselves?” It was to this that @PlutoBurns replied, “mostly its men who refuse to believe the pay gap is a problem and women invested in the patriarchy.”

To begin with, the “pay gap” between men and women is a statistical mirage, an apples-to-oranges comparison that fails to account for real differences between men and women, not evidence of discrimination.

 

The “pay gap” myth has been so thoroughly debunked that it seems futile to engage in argument with anyone stupid enough to believe it. But what about the claim that “women invested in the patriarchy” explain Hillary’s defeat? To refute this, we have to begin by asking what “patriarchy” is and how a woman can be said to have “invested” in it.

Hey, @PlutoBurns: Your mother is “invested in the patriarchy.”

That’s right — women who have sons want their sons to be successful. Mothers want their sons to grow up, get a good job, get married and produce some grandchildren for Grandma to spoil. Insofar as any woman is in favor of male success, she is “invested in the patriarchy.”

Every married women is “invested in the patriarchy,” whether she realizes it or not, because her husband’s success benefits her and her children. It is idiotic for young feminists (mainly college girls and other unmarried women) to blame their woes on “the patriarchy,” because the least patriarchal men in the world are young bachelors playing the familiar game of trying to get sex without commitment. The kind of selfish creeps a girl meets using Tinder or some other dating app? Those guys are not the “patriarchy,” but it is the emotional pain women suffer in the hookup scene that is the chief source of misery that causes young women to call themselves “feminists.” If guys were more patriarchal, they’d be romancing these girls with an eye toward marriage and making babies. And because married women are more likely to vote Republican, the best way to solve the most common complaint of young women . . .

Well, this is how you get more Trump.

The coalition of kooks and weirdos assembled beneath the Democrat banner are fools if they think they will defeat the patriarchy. There is simply no feasible alternative, as Steven Goldberg pointed out in his 1973 classic, The Inevitability of Patriarchy. The smart move for any young person, male or female, is to learn how the system works and find a way to succeed within it, rather than to base your hopes on a radical fantasy of overthrowing the system. And anyone who takes “Zinnia Jones” seriously as a political commentator is as deluded as he/“she” is.

 

Robert Tracinski Kills It

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The headline on Robert Tracinski’s column at The Federalist bothers me:

Nazi-Hunting Fantasies Have Unhinged The Left

This raises the question, when was the Left ever “hinged”? The Left has always been unhinged, going back as far as I can remember. I was eight years old when I watched on TV as the unhinged Left turned the Democrat convention into a riot in 1968, and a headline suggesting that the Left has lost its sanity requires me to ask what could cause anyone to imagine that the Left was sane in the first place. My problems with the headline aside, however, Tracinski’s column is so good it deserves an award of some kind. Here’s a small taste:

I’ve learned from Twitter in the last week that not only is the Trump White House chock full of white nationalists, but that also extends to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, along with the entire Republican Party. When Republicans like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio denounce Nazis, that doesn’t mean they’re not Nazis, it just means they’re posturing. Paul Ryan “owns” Nazism just by being a Republican, I guess. Oh, and unless he’s actually impeaching Trump, he’s a brownshirt.
People who complain about calling everybody Nazis are Nazis. Anyone who points out that there were also violent, anti-democracy anarcho-Communist “Antifa” demonstrators in Charlottesville is simply making excuses for Nazis — even if they work for the New York Times.
This isn’t even guilt by association. It’s guilt by free association, and it seems almost calculated to prevent the overwhelming number of people who oppose fascism and white nationalism from making common cause with one another. There are a lot of people who are taking an issue that somewhere around 99 percent of Americans ought to be able to agree on — ”Nazis are bad” — and trying to make it into a repellently partisan issue. It is as if they need us to be Nazis. If every one of them is Simon Wiesenthal, they’d better find an awful lot of Eichmanns. They need everyone who is not a card-carrying supporter of their political movement to be a total evil that justifies unlimited reprisal: from getting people fired from their jobs to beating them with sticks in the streets. . . .

Read the whole thing. It’s a home run, a grand slam — he ripped the hide off the ball and put it out in the parking lot behind centerfield.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

 

What Does It Mean to ‘Care’?

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Kayla Chadwick is an alumna of elite private Hebron Academy ($57,200 a year for boarding students), who got her bachelor’s degree from elite private Trinity College ($66,440 a year, including room and board) before getting her master’s degree from elite private Syracuse University ($60,239 a year including room and board). If you guessed her Daddy’s rich, uh . . . guess again, but like most rich kids nowadays, she’s the kind of “progressive” who considers herself obligated to tell the rest of us what to think. If your Daddy can’t afford the tuition at Trinity, obviously, you are inferior to Kayla Chadwick, and you should be grateful she has condescended to tutor you about your moral and intellectual failings.

I Don’t Know How To Explain To You
That You Should Care About Other People

That’s the headline on a Huffington Post column that Kayla Chadwick published in June, but which I didn’t encounter until today, and immediately took umbrage at Ms. Chadwick’s elitist condescension. Elliott Hamilton of Daily Wire said of Ms. Chadwick’s column that it “reaches peak virtue signaling while simultaneously expressing the sanctimonious nature of the political Left.” As a parody of snooty liberal know-it-all-ism, Ms. Chadwick’s argument is impeccable and if anybody wants to know How Your Get More Trump, she’s a perfect example.

 

She’s white, she’s privileged, and she wants you to know that her Emmy Award (for video editing) qualifies her to tell you what to think:

I don’t know how to explain to someone why they should care about other people.
Personally, I’m happy to pay an extra 4.3 percent for my fast food burger if it means the person making it for me can afford to feed their own family. If you aren’t willing to fork over an extra 17 cents for a Big Mac, you’re a fundamentally different person than I am.
I’m perfectly content to pay taxes that go toward public schools, even though I’m childless and intend to stay that way, because all children deserve a quality, free education. If this seems unfair or unreasonable to you, we are never going to see eye to eye.
If I have to pay a little more with each paycheck to ensure my fellow Americans can access health care? SIGN ME UP. Poverty should not be a death sentence in the richest country in the world. If you’re okay with thousands of people dying of treatable diseases just so the wealthiest among us can hoard still more wealth, there is a divide between our worldviews that can never be bridged.
I don’t know how to convince someone how to experience the basic human emotion of empathy. . . .

You can read the rest, but I think you see what it was about Kayla Chadwick’s argument that most offended me. Whereas my wife and I care so much about “other people” that we’ve raised a family of six children, Ms. Chadwick — the elite-educated beneficiary of wealth and privilege — is so self-centered she can’t be bothered. Like most young feminists, she’s childless because she’s too selfish to “care about other people,” except insofar as this involves (a) outsourcing the obligations of “empathy” to the government, and (b) urging people to vote Democrat.

Liberals care so much about the poor, for example, they insist that taxpayers should fund Planned Parenthood to give poor people abortions, and if that isn’t your definition of “empathy,” then obviously you didn’t get the kind of elite education Kayla Chadwick got at all those swanky private schools she attended. You’re probably part of those “hordes of selfish, cruel people” who don’t know “how to be a good person.” You voted Republican, and Kayla Chadwick has no empathy for you because you’re probably a heterosexual man, anyway . . .

 

 

Hating males for being male, hating white people for being white, hating heterosexuals for being heterosexual — this is “empathy,” according to the Democrat Party, and this is how you get more Trump.



 

 

Top Democrat Leader’s Aide Indicted

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Democrat aide Imran Awan (left); Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (right).

Here’s a huge scandal that CNN will pretend doesn’t matter:

FOX News reports former IT aide for Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Imran Awan, has been indicted on four counts. In July, Awan was arrested at Dulles airport while trying to flee the United States.

More details from Fox News:

Imran Awan, a former IT aide for Democratic Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was indicted Thursday on four counts including bank fraud and making false statements.
The indictment also includes his wife Hina Alvi.
The grand jury decision in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia comes roughly a month after Awan was arrested at Dulles airport in Virginia trying to board a plane to Pakistan, where his family is from.
Awan and other IT aides for House Democrats have been on investigators’ radar for months over concerns of possible double-billing, alleged equipment theft, and access to sensitive computer systems. Most lawmakers fired Awan in February, but Schultz had kept him on until his arrest in July.
The indictment itself, which merely represents formal charges and is not a finding of guilt, addresses separate allegations that Awan and his wife engaged in a conspiracy to obtain home equity lines of credit from the Congressional Federal Credit Union by giving false information about two properties — and then sending the proceeds to individuals in Pakistan.
The case has put renewed scrutiny on Wasserman Schultz for keeping Awan on the payroll for months, even after a criminal investigation was revealed and he was barred from the House IT network. 

(Hat-tip: Memeorandum.) We expect CNN to blame this on Russian hackers, just as soon as they finish blaming the Barcelona attack on Confederate monuments. Must! Defend! The Narrative!



 

Kamala Harris: Democrat ‘It Girl’

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Michael Krieger highlights a story about California’s freshman Sen. Kamala Harris, who will spend the weekend in the Hamptons being courted as a 2020 presidential candidate by big-money Democrats:

The California senator is being fêted in Bridgehampton on Saturday at the home of MWWPR guru Michael Kempner, a staunch Clinton supporter who was one of her national-finance co-chairs and a led fund-raiser for her 2008 bid for the presidency. He was also listed as one of the top “bundlers” for Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, having raised $3 million.
Guests there to greet Harris are expected to include Margo Alexander, a member of Clinton’s inner circle; Dennis Mehiel, a Democratic donor who is the chairman of the Battery Park City Authority, even though he lives between a sprawling Westchester estate and an Upper East Side pad; designer Steven Gambrel and Democratic National Committee member Robert Zimmerman.
Washington lobbyist Liz Robbins is also hosting a separate Hamptons lunch for Harris.

So, the deep-pocket donors, the D.C. lobbyists and the public-relations hacks all agree that this woman from California is their ticket for 2020. Remember when Democrats were the party of “the little guy”?