Category: Democrats

Look for the ‘Hate’ Label (or, Why Everybody’s a ‘Far-Right’ Extremist Now)

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Who is Kevin Panetta? He is the writer behind a comic book called Zodiac Starforce, which looks a lot like a ripoff of Sailor Moon, but that’s irrelevant to his role as a volunteer with the Thought Police. Panetta got more than 45,000 retweets and more than 80,000 likes for his assertion that disagreeing with SJWs is “just hate.” Notice his all-inclusive laundry list of Thought Crimes which, he declares, are not “political views” and therefore need to be silenced. Now ask, “What do these words mean?”

What is “racism,” and how is it to be distinguished from “white supremacy”? Or what is “sexism”? Is it “islamophobia” to point out that Islamic doctrine is both sexist and homophobic? And considering the conflict between transgender activists and feminists (e.g., Julie Bindel and Meghan Murphy), how do we unravel the separate strands of “just hate” to distinguish between “sexism,” “homophobia” and “transphobia”?

Is it even permissible to ask such questions? Are we allowed to question the SJW Thought Police about the definitions of “just hate” or (as I rather suspect) will we be condemned as guilty merely for questioning their authority to define these terms to suit their own purposes?

George Orwell wrote in Politics and the English Language:

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. . . . Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.

Allowing an explosive term like “white supremacy” to be redefined in such a way that anyone who criticized, e.g., the Black Lives Matter protests could be accused of it, is a very dangerous practice.

The progressive Left is using “hate” labels to prohibit rational argument about important issues of public policy. Go read Ryan Anderson’s critique of the transgender agenda, for example, and then tell me that his argument is “just hate.” SJWs are liars, trying to silence the truth.

Ryan Broderick’s Buzzfeed headline about “far-right activists” on YouTube focuses in the lead on Lauren Southern, a 22-year-old who is described by Broderick as “part of a sprawling new universe of far-right internet personalities who have aligned themselves with a ‘new right’ or ‘alt-right’ or ‘new far-right’ political youth movement.” Broderick’s article uses some not-very-subtle guilt-by-association to link Lauren Southern to personalities like Richard Spencer with whom she has no known association. Southern gained Internet fame a couple of years ago for declaring that the feminist movement doesn’t speak for her. She has since spoken out against unrestricted immigration, but is it necessarily “far-right” to oppose open-borders policies? Aren’t there legitimate social and economic issues involved in immigration policy that justify such opposition? Never mind such questions, Broderick declares Lauren Southern “dangerous,” more or less implying she’s a neo-Nazi, and at the end of his article, includes this paragraph:

Despite all of this, Southern still believes approaching far-right activism as a social media influencer is the way to go. She’s excited about recent controversies, like YouTube and Disney’s Maker Studios dropping video game YouTuber PewDiePie over anti-Semitic jokes, YouTube comedian JonTron doing interviews with Breitbart and far-right YouTuber Sargon of Akkad, or sexual education vlogger Laci Green making videos playing with alt-right themes. To Southern, these are signs that she’s on the right side of things.

You see the ransom-note method of links-and-ties Broderick is employing here. Lauren Southern is “alt-right” and is therefore “linked” to every other person who can be labeled “alt-right,” so that when Laci Green begins to have second thoughts about her SJW allegiances, this is portrayed as signifying that she is linked, for example, to the Etayyim Brothers whose shtick was to “take a camera into predominantly black communities in Brooklyn and antagonize residents.” This is a complete non sequitur, which Broderick throws into his article as part of his sloppy guilt-by-association smear. There is no reason to believe Laci Green would ever do such a thing, nor do we have any reason to think of the Etayyim Brothers as part of an “alt-right” to which Green (or Lauren Southern) belongs. But of course, Broderick is a hypocrite, throwing stones from a glass house, because a few years ago, as Ian Miles Cheong points out, Broderick produced YouTube videos in which “the BuzzFeed writer wore a Nazi uniform while brandishing a swastika on his arm alongside a man dressed as a Jewish prisoner.”

Well, nobody has ever accused Laci Green or Lauren Southern of brandishing swastikas in their videos, so maybe this “far-right” thing isn’t as dangerous as Buzzfeed would have us believe. However, by using the term “far-right” so haphazardly as to include anyone who doesn’t vote Democrat, left-wingers like Ryan Broderick are actually arguing for censorship. Lauren Southern is “dangerous” and she is “going to get people hurt,” Buzzfeed readers are led to believe, and isn’t Broderick suggesting that YouTube suppress her “far-right” videos? Isn’t he arguing that crowdfunding platforms like Patreon and GoFundMe should exclude anyone labeled “far-right” by the Thought Police? Banishing their opponents from online discourse, depriving conservatives of access to platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, is very much a part of the SJW agenda, and they’re doing this the same way the Left has abolished free speech on campus, by making “hate” a synonym for “Republican”:

Anything that is not liberal is labeled “hate,” and anything which is not about promoting the Democrat Party is “right-wing” or “far right.” Any appearance on a college campus by anyone associated with conservative or Republican (i.e., “far right”) political ideas is funded by “right-wing billionaires,” and this “hate” is “putting students in danger.”
The Left deliberately encourages this simple-minded intolerance, demonizing their political opponents, even while they accuse Republicans of “extremism,” “hate” and being “ideologically driven.”

Because I have been exposing left-wing totalitarianism for years (and have, of course, been labeled a “white supremacist,” etc., for doing so), I am glad to see others finally becoming aware of the Thought Police tactics the Left employs to suppress online dissent. We’re all “far-right” now. Readers are invited to hit the freaking tip jar, while it’s still legal.



 

 

GA-6: ‘The Big Short’ and the Establishment Media Bubble

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Tuesday night, I monitored election results from Georgia’s 6th District special election on my phone (via AoSHQ Decision Desk) while finishing up a day mowing lawns for my son’s contracting business. We were leaning on the truck and enjoying cold beverages while Jim chatted with his business partner when the Decision Desk called it for Republican Karen Handel — a sweet moment. Democrats had poured an estimated $30 million into “Pajamaboy Carpetbagger” Jon Osoff’s doomed campaign and came away with another “L,” their fourth consecutive special-election defeat since Trump’s election.

Democrats’ hope of returning to power by riding a wave of anti-Trump “backlash” has been exposed as a delusion based on denial. Along with their media allies, Democrats simply refuse to accept the reality that American voters have rejected them. Democrats are the ex-boyfriend who refuses to move on, and voters are the girl getting stalked on Facebook by an obsessed loser who can’t take a hint. It’s creepy.

The now iconic image of the CNN crew at 9:43 pm ET Tuesday is a perfect distillation of a problem we can call the Establishment Media Bubble.

Those pictured were CNN’s political director David Chalian, CNN’s chief political analyst Gloria Borger, CNN’s executive director of Political Programming/Sr. Political Analyst Mark Preston, and Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash.

The pretense of journalistic objectivity, which is the Establishment Media’s stock in trade, has become so transparently implausible that no intelligent viewer could be deceived by it. Beyond that, and perhaps more importantly, the media’s pretense of political expertise was even more brutally exposed as a fraud — a hoax as bogus as “Haven Monahan.”

If Mark Preston is such an insightful political analyst, why couldn’t CNN accurately predict the outcome of this election? For the same reason that CNN was so disastrously wrong in 2016: They are no longer a news organization, but instead are a Democrat propaganda operation. Mark Preston is a partisan Democrat who, as a University of Massachusetts student, worked in Ted Kennedy’s office. Ask yourself this question: In his role as a CNN executive, would Mark Preston ever hire a reporter who had worked for Rand Paul or Ted Cruz? Answer: Fuck no.

CNN, like every other Establishment Media organization, actively discriminates against Republicans in its hiring decisions. Mark Preston’s network is a sort of political cult that only employs True Believers. The organization’s journalistic standards are subordinated to its political mission, which is to persuade viewers to vote Democrat. Period.

 

* * * * *

 

When my son had finished up talking with his business partner Tuesday night, we went to my son’s house and watched The Big Short on Netflix. My son had already seen the movie twice, but I never had, and I kept trying to shush him and my brother, who were talking during most of the show. Because a lot of my son’s business involves “repo flips” — rehabbing properties that have been repossessed, so that they can be resold — he has a direct familiarity with how the housing market operates at the practical level. And he’s been doing this kind of work since he was a teenager, during the final years of the bubble, so he can tell you what it was like from the ant’s-eye view. The Big Short is a fascinating movie, but the “moral of the story” at the end of the film is badly flawed. The filmmakers want to sell the audience an “Occupy Wall Street”/Bernie Sanders left-populist myth, that the subprime mortgage industry was a result of deregulation and/or Bush-era Republican corruption.

“Stop the movie!” I shouted at Jim, when we got to that payoff scene, after Mark Baum (who in real life is actually Steve Eisman) has made the final decision to sell his short options. “The people who got those mortgages were as guilty as the people who gave them the mortgages!”

If you were buying a $400,000 home with a zero-down ARM for which you could not qualify under any normal standards of credit worthiness, you weren’t the victim of a fraud, you were an active accomplice. People who “bought” homes with so-called NINJA (no income, no job) loans were engaged in an immoral enterprise, and it is wrong to exempt them from blame for doing something they must have known was wrong.

To repeat what I’ve said before: If something seems too good to be true, it is either (a) not really true, or (b) not really good. The notion that any random loser could (and should) become a homeowner was always dubious, and government policies intended to promote minority home ownership By Any Means Necessary played a huge role in the housing bubble, a crucial factor that The Big Short does not acknowledge. The filmmakers want to exempt from blame the people who became “homeowners” by getting ARM mortgages they knew (or should have known) they would not be able to pay back. If you want to blame “greed” for the housing bubble, isn’t it true that the people who bought homes with NINJA loans were as greedy, in their own way, as the bond hustlers whose collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) financed those loans?

Well, what does this have to do with CNN’s pathetic excuse for political journalism? It’s this — the people who watch CNN are as much a part of the problems as the people who run CNN. Just as the housing bubble could never have happened, had there not been so many uncreditworthy borrowers willing to buy homes with no-money-down ARMs, there could be no Establishment Media Bubble, if there weren’t so many people willing to consume the blatantly biased “journalism” produced by CNN (and NBC, and the New York Times, etc.). You will never go broke underestimating the intelligence of Democrat voters, and the Establishment Media’s business is based on exploiting this stupidity.

The Democrat viewers who let CNN convince them that Jon Osoff was going to win GA-6, and thereby vindicate the anti-Trump #Resistance, learned nothing from Tuesday night’s results. Those viewers woke up this morning and turned on their TVs to watch the “experts” on CNN explain to them what went wrong and what this means for the future. But why should anyone believe the Establishment Media’s explanations for another Democrat defeat, when the Establishment Media failed to predict this defeat, in the same way they failed to predict Hillary’s defeat?

 

Mark Preston is not an omniscient political genius. He is not really that much smarter than the average Democrat, or else he wouldn’t have been sitting there Tuesday night on the CNN set looking like a guy who just got home from Vegas and has to tell his wife how much money he lost.

Stephen Miller at Heat Street summarizes the result:

Herein lies the Democrats’ problem, just as it was a problem when Hillary Clinton bellowed about a basket full of deplorables during the 2016 campaign. The Democrats and their base (Hollywood) think the key to winning elections is to insult voters. “They don’t vote for us because they are bigots” is not a strategy I would employ as a campaign manager but they are welcome to keep trying this, and they are welcome to keep losing.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)



 

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

 

The Left Continues Fomenting Hatred

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Really? Fusion.com exploits the fact that a black lesbian is a member of the Capitol Police force to label a wounded Republican congressman a “bigoted homophobe.” Has Steve Scalise, or any other GOP member of Congress, advocated a policy that would prohibit hiring of black people, women, or homosexuals as Capitol Police? No, that never happened, and so labeling Scalise a “bigoted homophobe” is merely a continuation of the anti-Republican rhetoric that inspired “passionate progressive” James Hodgkinson to open fire Wednesday morning.

In April, I called attention to how the Left has developed the habit of using “hate” as a synonym for Republican. This rhetorical tactic explains the mood of irrational fear and rage that has gripped so many on the Left since Donald Trump was elected President. There is nothing that separates the shooter Hodgkinson from the typical “progressive” blogger. Hodgkinson was part of the “Occupy” protests and denounced the “one percent” — the same kind of sentiment commonly espoused by Democrat politicians and their liberal media allies. Demonizing their opponents in this way has become standard operating procedure for the Left — “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it,” to quote Saul Alinsky — and we should not be surprised when such tactics inspire criminal violence. As Rep. Rodney Davis said, this is “rhetorical terrorism.”



 

Anti-American Democrats: What the NSA Leaker Has Revealed About the Left

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If you love America, never doubt that Democrats hate you. During the past half-century, dating back at least to the 1968 election, Democrats have become the anti-American party, fanatically devoted to the destruction of capitalism, Christianity and the Constitution. This historic shift has made Democrats, in effect, opponents of patriotism. “They always blame America first,” as Jeanne Kirkpatrick famously said.

This is what we learn from the NSA leaker:

The 25-year-old woman who stole “Top Secret” documents from the National Security Agency and leaked them to The Intercept appears to be a supporter of Bernie Sanders and other progressive icons, such as Bill Maher and Michael Moore.
Reality Leigh Winner’s apparent social media footprint also shows that she is a supporter of other liberal causes, including the Women’s March and the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim civil rights group.
She also recently referred to President Trump as a “piece of shit” because of his position on the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protests.
Winner was indicted in federal court on Monday after she allegedly stole classified documents from her employer, Pluribus International, a defense contractor that does work for the NSA from its offices in Augusta, Ga. . . .
On Feb. 14, a day after Winner took her Top Secret job at Pluribus, Winner posted a photo outside of the Atlanta offices of Georgia Sen. David Perdue.
Winner wrote that she had a 30-minute private meeting with the Republican lawmaker.
She said they discussed “my concerns regarding climate change and what the state of Georgia is doing to reduce dependency on fossil fuels.”
“Meanwhile, my plea that our senators not be afraid to directly state when our president or his cabinet tell outright lies was well heard. I was able to draw the parallel between the 2011 interview of President Bashar al Assad claiming utter ignorance of the human rights violations> his citizens were protesting to Trump’s statement last week that the White House hadn’t received any calls about the DAPL, nor were there any protests before last week. They got the message,” she wrote.
Winner was heavily critical of Trump just after he took office. She used the hashtag “NeverMyPresident” and “Resist” in a Facebook post about his position on DAPL.

You see that she is an across-the-board “progressive” and, as such, is an enemy of everything America is about. She is opposed to American petroleum production — because “climate change” — and is a feminist, but yet is pro-Muslim, despite the pervasive misogyny of Islamic culture.

This kind of reflexive, unthinking, knee-jerk leftism is full of contradictions. It reflects a profound alienation from the mainstream of American life. They lash out at Republicans as symbolic scapegoats who represent, in the leftist mind, everything they hate about our country.

 

The Chicken Little Democrats

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“It’s a shameful moment for the United States. . . . He’s made us an environmental pariah in the world.”
— John Kerry, on MSNBC

The liberal media’s all-Russia-all-the-time news coverage was interrupted yesterday when President Trump announced that he was repudiating the Paris Climate Accord, which the Obama administration had signed onto at the 2015 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. And the reaction of failed 2004 Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry was typical of the sky-is-falling gloom-and-doom Chicken Little crowd. Failed 2000 Democrat presidential candidate Al Gore called Trump’s decision “reckless and indefensible.”

Claiming that nations which implement the U.N. regulations will benefit from the “jobs and industries created,” former President Obama said that Trump’s decision puts the United States among “a small handful of nations that reject the future.” Yes — surrender your economy to a bunch of U.N. bureaucrats, or else you “reject the future.”

This over-the-top reaction is indicative of how the Democrats and their media allies have become heavily invested in “climate change” as a crisis requiring government action. Having lived long enough to remember many previous examples of this liberal crisis-mongering behavior — e.g., Paul Ehrlich and The Population Bomb — I have good reason to be skeptical of alarmist “climate change” rhetoric. One reason young people are so easily convinced to vote Democrat is that young people haven’t had enough experience to acquire this kind of skepticism. Only after you have spent decades watching liberals gin up fears of a “crisis” (which they then exploit as an excuse to elect Democrats) do you recognize the familiar pattern Thomas Sowell describes in his book The Vision of the Anointed:

  • Stage 1, The “Crisis”: Some situation exists, whose negative aspects the anointed [leftists] propose to eliminate. Such a situation is routinely characterized as a “crisis” … even though evidence is seldom asked or given to show how the situation at hand is either uniquely bad or threatening to get worse. Sometimes the situation described as a “crisis” has in fact already been getting better for years.
  • Stage 2, The “Solution”: Policies to end the “crisis” are advocated by the anointed, who say that these policies will lead to beneficial result A. Critics say that these policies will lead to detrimental result Z. The anointed dismiss these latter claims as absurd and “simplistic,” if not dishonest.
  • Stage 3, The Results: The policies are instituted and lead to detrimental result Z.
  • Stage 4, The Response: Those who attribute detrimental result Z to the policies instituted are dismissed as “simplistic” for ignoring the “complexities” involved, as “many factors” went into determining the outcome. The burden of proof is on the critics to demonstrate to a certainty that these policies alone were the only possible cause of the worsening that occurred. No burden of proof whatever is put on those who had so confidently predicted improvement. Indeed it is often asserted that things would have been even worse, were it not for the wonderful programs that mitigated the inevitable damage from other factors.

The climate-change “crisis” is simply a political tactic. Parents need to warn their children about being deceived by such tactics.

“If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you,” Calvin Coolidge once said, and the kind of fear-mongering promoted by Democrats is not only dishonest, but it tends to undermine mental health. How much of the “epidemic” of depression among young people can be blamed on Democrats constantly hyping threats of a global catastrophe?

We have a “mental health crisis” among young people and if you think the solution to this “crisis” is to elect more Democrats, you’re crazy.



 

New Name, Same Game: ACORN Revived as Soros-Funded ‘Democracy’ Network

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In 2009, James O’Keefe, Hannah Giles and Andrew Breitbart basically destroyed ACORN, the radical “social justice” group that had begun as a spinoff of the National Welfare Rights Organization and grown into a nationwide political network. The wreckage of ACORN exposed the connections between these left-wing groups and the Alinsky tactics used by former “community organizer” Barack Obama. Destroying ACORN as an organization, however, did not destroy the idea behind it, and many of the same people are now organizing a new network:

A new $80 million anti-Trump network is being led by an organization whose top funder is liberal billionaire George Soros and which employs former members of the controversial and now-defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).
The Center for Popular Democracy Action Fund, the 501(c)(4) sister organization of the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), a New York-based nonprofit that receives the bulk of its funding from George Soros, announced at their spring gala Tuesday that they will be heading up the new $80 million anti-Trump network that will span 32 states and have 48 local partners, CNN reported. . . .
The Center for Popular Democracy, which was founded in 2012, consists of old chapters of ACORN, the community-organizing group that was forced to close after being stripped of its federal funds following controversy in 2010.
Andrew Friedman, a co-executive director at the Center for Popular Democracy, co-founded Make the Road New York, a Latino immigrant group that has worked alongside CPD on a number of anti-Trump campaigns. Friedman serves on the board of Make the Road New York (MRNY) and Make the Road Action Fund, which are closely linked to CPD and contain many overlapping staffers. . . .
The groups, which have combined to receive millions in funding from George Soros, funnel money to each other. . . .
Soros has a goal of enlarging the electorate by 10 million voters by 2018, the Washington Free Beacon discovered after a trove of hacked Soros documents were released last year by DC Leaks.

How is this “enlarging the electorate” supposed to happen? By activist groups doing what used to be called “knock and drag” get-out-the-vote operations — knock on the door and drag them to the polls. In the meantime, of course, they’ll be organizing “spontaneous” protests to keep up the appearance of a grassroots anti-Trump movement, but the green in this grass comes from a radical billionaire ideologue.



 

 

President of NYC Young Democrats Arrested on Child Pornography Charges

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The New York Post reports:

A leading young Democrat and de Blasio administration employee has a secret taste for sickening kiddie porn that involves baby girls as young as 6 months old, court papers revealed Friday.
Jacob Schwartz, 29, was busted for allegedly keeping more than 3,000 disgusting images and 89 videos on a laptop after downloading the filth from the internet.
The illegal smut shows “young nude females between the approximate ages of 6 months and 16, engaging in sexual conduct… on an adult male,” court papers say.
Schwartz’s father — labor lawyer and Democratic insider Arthur Schwartz — called his son’s case “a personal tragedy.”
“I understand these are serious charges,” said the elder Schwartz, who watched his son get arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court on Thursday night. . . .
Jacob Schwartz surrendered to NYPD computer-crimes investigators in Manhattan’s 13th Precinct on Thursday morning, sources said.
He’d been under investigation since March 29, when he handed over his laptop and gave cops written permission to search it, court papers say.
Jacob Schwartz is the president of the Manhattan Young Democrats and the downstate region vice president of the New York State Young Democrats. . . .
Schwartz is employed as a $66,360-a-year computer programmer analyst in the city Department of Design and Construction, where he works on the “Build It Back” Hurricane Sandy recovery and resiliency program.

President of the Young Democrats! A typical “progressive” male . . .

 

A Cautionary Point About 2018

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by Smitty

The Z Blog has some of the most thought-provoking posts going these days. A post today about a French province trying to counter the Revolution is quite instructive:

The revolt in the Vendée region, on the west coast of France, began with the March 1793 conscription requiring Vendeans to fill their quota of 300,000 men for the army. The enraged populace took up arms and quickly formed a Catholic Army. What started as a demand for reopening the churches and getting their priests back, turned into a Royalist counter rebellion against the Republic. Initially, the Republicans were caught off-guard and the rebels enjoyed some success, even though their army was ill-equipped.

The Republic got its bearings and sent a 45,000 man army to suppress the rebellion and by the fall of that year the rebel army was defeated. The Committee for Public Safety decided that beating the army was not enough and opted for pacification. Whether or not the word “genocide” is appropriate is debatable.

Do read he whole thing.

The Democrats and the media urchins have been shamed. “Don’t think we’re not keeping score,” as Obama noted.
I’m not saying to view the Republicans uncritically. However, I daresay that the IRS harassment of the Tea Parties shall have seemed like hugs and cupcakes compared to the peevish, punitive, discriminatory crap that the Deep State would inflict on Trump voters in general, and red states in particular, given another chance.
So maybe we don’t want to let them have that chance.