Category: South Carolina

#Marianne2020: Let’s Make This Happen

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Lawrence Person has a roundup on the emerging Democrat 2020 presidential field and, buried deep down in his massive linkfest is the news that Hillary Clinton’s former “spiritual adviser” Marianne Williamson has launched a campaign for president. He links this news article from the Keene (N.H.) Sentinel Source:

Hoping to bring “a massive infusion of love” into the country’s politics, Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson held town halls in two area communities Sunday.
Roughly 60 people filled Keene State College’s student center for the late-afternoon event, which was sponsored by the Campus American Democracy Project. Williamson also stopped by the Hancock Town Library earlier Sunday and spoke to a similarly sized crowd. . . .
[M]uch of Williamson’s stump speech at Keene State centered on how to “wage peace” and ensure the country’s international and domestic policies are morally sound.
She offered four steps in a quick how-to guide to world peace: expand economic opportunities for women around the world; expand educational opportunities for children globally; reduce violence against women; improve unnecessary human suffering wherever possible.
“But as we know, doing those things does not produce corporate profits,” she said.
The U.S. needs an integrative model of politics that considers how hope, despair and love operate, she said. “We need a massive infusion of love for our children, a massive infusion of love for each other, a massive infusion of love for the rest of the people in this world, which is the only way we will survive the next century.”

The Concord (N.H.) Monitor reports:

Author Marianne Williamson built her career providing guidance on relationships, health and work to Americans through her writing, which caught the attention of celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, who calls her a “spiritual guru.”
Now, she’s hoping to apply that same knowledge in her campaign for president.
“Whether you are healing a life, or healing a nation, the same spiritual and moral and psychological principles prevail,” Williamson said, speaking to a crowd of about 50 people at New England College in Henniker on Tuesday. “All a nation is, is a group of people.”
Williamson, the author of 12 books who announced her candidacy for president in January, said she thinks about taking care of American democracy a lot like she thinks about taking care of the human body.
A healthy democracy, like a healthy body, needs to be nurtured and continually monitored over time, she said.
“You can’t take your health for granted, or you just might lose it,” she said. “You have to take care of your democracy too or if you’re not careful you just might lose it.”
Williamson said America has come very close to losing its healthy democracy. She described President Donald Trump as an “opportunistic infection” the country became exposed to because of its “weakened immune system.”

 

After being interviewed on CBS Interactive, Williamson wrote:

I’m delighted to be sharing a different political conversation than the one we have been having, and grateful for the opportunity to do so. America is in crisis and our politics is a symptom as much as a cause. Addressing our deeper problems only on the level of what we currently think of as the issues 1) will not fundamentally put our country on a different track, and 2) will not defeat the current occupant of the White House. We need a whole-person, multidimensional discussion of what truly ails is. What we think of as the issues are not always the deeper issue. Americans are in chronic tension and anxiety, often exacerbated by economic conditions, chronic injustices, the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the lack of moral compass guiding our journey as a nation. “Qualified politicians “ have brought us to where we are, and we should think about what qualifications are most needed now. What we could use in a president is someone who understands the deeper crisis, and has had a decades long career in helping people and groups transform conditions from the inside out. We need more than a new president. We need a new political conversation, a new dimension of citizenship among all of us, a new awakening of the American spirit, and a recognition that this country should not be run like a business. It should be run like a family. We need someone to connect the dots, to bring wisdom into the conversation, and break the chokehold of our current political mentality. We have turned market forces into a false god, and the corruption is destroying us. The corruption could never have taken hold had women been more empowered, and freer to say what we truly think and feel. Our children, our health, our families, our very earth are suffering under the weight of a late 20th Century political and economic mentality that puts the short-term profits of large multinational corporations before the well-being of people and planet. We should be saying this and standing for this. I am willing to do so, and I hope you will too.

To put it bluntly, Marianne Williamson makes Beto O’Rourke seem like a paragon of gravitas by comparison. She is exactly the kind of lightweight “fringe” candidate who needs to make it to the Final 8 round of the Democrat primary campaign. She’s got more than 2.6 million Twitter followers, and if she can leverage her Oprah-certified celebrity status into an effective fundraising operation — say, $75,000 a month in small donations — she could run a grassroots campaign appealing to a core constituency of “feminist spirituality” enthusiasts who, it must be said, are no more irrational than people who think Bernie Sanders could be elected President. It’s like when Jesse Jackson ran for president; there was no way he could win, but his campaign was symbolically important.

A bit of Googling is all that is needed to find fundamentalist Christians denouncing Marianne Williamson as a “New Age Witch.” If ever there was a candidate whose influence could convince evangelical voters that the Democrats are beholden to satanic powers, she’s the one.

All Marianne Williamson needs is a chance to connect with her natural constituency by appearing in the televised Democrat debates. But gosh, what could help boost her candidacy? If only some veteran journalist could give her campaign the kind of coverage she deserves . . .

 

You see, Marianne Williamson has announced a schedule of events this weekend in South Carolina, and it’s been a while since I’ve been out on the campaign trail, but if readers want to send me out on the road again to cover the 2020 Democrat primary race, this would be a nice start.

It’s 491 miles to Myrtle Beach, S.C., where Marianne Williamson will be speaking Sunday to the Horry County Democratic Party, so that’s a 1,182-mile round trip, and at 20 cents a mile, that’s $263 in the Shoe Leather Fund. Two nights in a Myrtle Beach hotel would cost about $175, so there’s no reason I couldn’t spend three days following Marianne Williamson around — she’ll be at the South Carolina Democrat Party executive committee meeting Saturday, and appearing at two events Monday in Georgetown, S.C. Next month, she’ll be traveling to Iowa, where a friend has offered me couch-sleeping privileges, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, eh? It should take about $450 to make this South Carolina trip happen, so if 30 readers could contribute $15 each, or if 15 readers could contribute $30 each, I can go ahead and book that hotel.

 

Is it possible Marianne Williamson could emerge as an unexpected dark-horse challenger in the 2020 Democrat campaign? It’s not impossible, considering what a clown-car crowd of flakes and phonies are being taken seriously by the media as 2020 contenders. South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg is polling at 1.3% in the Real Clear Politics average, and his sole qualification is, he’s gay. John Hickenlooper, Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand — when you get down into the lower tier of 2020 Democrats, none of them poll as high as 3% nationally. Also, none of those candidates have 2.6 million Twitter followers and are on a first-name basis with Oprah Winfrey, both of which qualifications Marianne Williamson brings to this campaign. She’s a bestselling author whose campaign has been written up by BuzzFeed and, as I say, all she needs to do is qualify for the televised debates in order to get her shot at connecting with a larger audience of Democrat voters. My hunch is that, in such a format, her mystical rhetoric and charismatic personality will earn her a surprising amount of support and favorable media coverage. She is the most serious of un-serious candidates and, if she can clear the first hurdle, its entirely possible she could make it to the Final 8, where the cutoff might be as low as a 5% national-poll number.

 

The best way to cover a presidential campaign is at the grassroots level with a long-shot candidate so low in the polls that they’re not surrounded by a swarm of major media. So I’m looking at this South Carolina trip, and the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

What splendid mischief — let’s make this happen.

UPDATE: “Just Got Off the Phone . . .”



 

Transgender Professor in South Carolina Attacks Feminists as ‘Cockroaches’

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Until a few years ago, Professor Rachel McKinnon was a Canadian, and was also a male. Rhys McKinnon attended the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where he got a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 2005. Sometime thereafter, Rhys McKinnon decided he was a “she,” so that by the time he/“she” received his/“her” Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, the name on the diploma was “Rachel Veronica McKinnon.”

Well, when in Canada, do as the Canadians do, I suppose, but somehow Professor McKinnon got hired to teach . . . in South Carolina???

The College of Charleston is a taxpayer-supported public institution whose president is Glenn McConnell, a former Republican state senator.

Do taxpayers in South Carolina know what’s being done with their money? Do they know that this professor at the College of Charleston used Mother’s Day as an occasion to label parents as “abusive” if they aren’t “supportive” of sex-changes for their children?

 

“A word to the kids — the trans kids whose parents maybe don’t support them as much as we would hope. Unfortunately, this is too common. I want to give you some hope, though. I want you to know that it’s OK to walk away from unsupportive or disrespectful or even abusive parents, and I want to give you hope that you can find what we call your ‘glitter family,’ your ‘queer family.’ We are out there, and the relationships that we make in our glitter families are just as real, just as meaningful as our blood families. Also, you can reach out to me. You can email me. You can call me. We can Skype. I’m happy to talk, if you need someone to talk to.”

Permit me to say, as a parent of six children, that if a demented freak like Rachel McKinnon ever tried to talk to any of my kids — “You can call me. We can Skype.” — I would not hesitate to call the police. Yet here is this weirdo on YouTube inviting “trans kids” to contact him/“her” for “support” as a member of the “glitter queer family,” and doing this as a professor on the payroll of a state college in South Carolina.

 

As might be expected, Professor McKinnon’s “glitter queer family” recruitment video sparked controversy. However, it wasn’t South Carolina Republicans who complained, but rather feminists.

MtoF tells trans kids to dump moms
on Mother’s Day and join the “glitter-queer”
family of adult trans activists

That was the headline at Gender Trender, a feminist website that is opposed to transgender activism. These “gender critical” feminists consider transgender ideology to be anti-woman, and also dangerous to children. In the Gender Critical Reddit forum, one contributor commented on Professor McKinnon’s video:

So…this is just grooming. It’s not necessarily sexual (although Jesus, it couldn’t seem creepier if he tried) but grooming is grooming.
And sexual abuse of young trans people is rampant. . . .
So even if this specific man isn’t a child predator he is encouraging children to make themselves even more vulnerable to abuse by isolating them from friends and family, telling them to hide their online activity, and explaining that their parents just don’t understand how smart and mature and ready they are to make decisions about their bodies.
There is nothing new about this. We know that adults trying to lure children from their families are bad actors. This is disgusting and creepy and wrong.

The long-running dispute between feminists and transgender activists has made headlines (see “What Is a Woman?” in the New Yorker, Aug. 4, 2014), and transgender activists invented the label “TERF” — trans-exclusive radical feminist — to stigmatize their opponents. Predictably, when Professor McKinnon’s Mother’s Day video elicited online criticism, he/“she” responded by demonizing his/“her” critics: “TERFs are like cockroaches: they’re brave and active until you turn the lights on. They run pretty quickly when you shine the light on them.”

However, it is not feminists who have refused to engage in discussion on this issue. Instead, transgender activists have sought to silence their critics, prohibiting disagreement as “hate speech,” and preventing opponents of transgender ideology from speaking on campus. Feminists have refused to back down. At a Heritage Foundation panel discussion earlier this year, Mary Lou Singleton, a member of the radical Women’s Liberation Front, said opposition to transgenderism “has become ‘forbidden discourse’ on the left”:

She said her nurse practitioner practice was hit with a boycott because she refused to use the preferred pronouns of an alleged serial rapist who abused children. . . .
“The medical transitioning of children is gay conversion therapy on steroids — literally.”

All of this would be merely an argument between private individuals, were it not for the fact that Professor McKinnon is on the payroll of a state college in South Carolina, where it seems unlikely that taxpayers know what kind of weird ideas are being promoted at their expense.

If you are a citizen of South Carolina, you have a right to speak out about the kind of “education” being provided at your expense, and I sincerely doubt that officials in South Carolina will be eager to defend Professor McKinnon’s “glitter queer family” recruitment video. My suggestion to readers is that that they share this article as widely as possible with their family and friends. Send it by email, or share it on Facebook or Twitter. Surely there must be sane people in South Carolina who appreciate how insulting it is to parents that state officials have hired this Canadian freak to teach their young people that “the relationships that we make in our glitter families are just as real, just as meaningful as our blood families.”

Professor McKinnon claims his/“her” critics are “propagandists” whom he/“she” does not need to debate, but “merely expose their claims to the sunlight.” Can Professor McKinnon’s “glitter queer family” recruitment withstand exposure to sunlight? We shall see.

UPDATE: Someone has done a YouTube clip highlighting Professor McKinnon’s use of child imagery in his/“her” recruitment video:

 

Remember: South Carolina taxpayers provide Professor McKinnon’s salary. This is therefore an official, state-endorsed ideology.



 

Ray Moore Is Right!

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Ray Moore is a candidate in the South Carolina Republican primary for lieutenant governor. He is also a courageous Christian patriot whom I first interviewed in 2002 when he published a book (and accompanying documentary video) called Let My Children Go. Moore is an advocate of Christian education and a supporter of the homeschooling movement who believes — as do I — that the public school system is hopelessly broken and incapable of reform. So here is the headline on Rebecca Klein’s story at Huffington Post:

GOP Candidate Says Christians
Must Pull Their Kids Out
Of ‘Godless’ Public Schools

That this is a ginned-up liberal hit piece, you can tell by the tendentious use of scare-quotes around the word “godless.”

Is this even a matter of dispute in 2014? Does anyone deny that, as the result of both judicial rulings and institutional policy, the expression of religious belief is prohibited in American public schools? Furthermore, anyone familiar with the curriculum and pedagogy of public schools can tell you that what students are now being taught is an aggressively secular, anti-biblical worldview.

Well, as Joseph said to his brothers in Egypt, what the Huffington Post meant for evil, God meant for good. This attempt to portray Ray Moore as a dangerous extremist is the kind of free publicity that may catapult his candidacy to victory. We’re talking about a South Carolina Republican primary, after all. Being nationally known as the Christian conservative who stands firmly in opposition to godless public schools is probably worth thousands of dollars in contributions and enough extra votes to ensure a spot in the runoff.

Who needs any further argument?

CLICK HERE NOW TO DONATE TO RAY MOORE

Never miss a chance to defy the godless media.

 

Sen. Lindsey Graham May Try Out New Look To Fend Off Tea Party Challenger

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by Smitty

Let’s face it: life is tough in RINO-land, and the growing backlash against political deadwood cannot be denied. The Blaze reports:

It’s official: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) will face a Tea Party challenger in 2014.
A spokesperson for Republican Nancy Mace, who is already being billed as a Tea Party favorite, confirmed to TheBlaze on Thursday that she plans to challenge Graham for his Senate seat in the 2014 Republican primary. She plans to make a “special announcement” about her run at the Berkeley County GOP Breakfast on Saturday.
The spokesperson said the campaign will be releasing more information and Mace will be doing interviews following the formal announcement.

Meanwhile, Sissypuss the Blog Kitty, disguised as a mole, and infiltrating Graham’s inner circle, discovers that androgyny is the new black among political fashion strategists:
Can an avant-garde makeover get Lindsey where he wants to go? On a non-Saturday night? Stay tuned.

Nancy Mace for Senate

Help free the country from metrosexual tyranny!

via ILamy7

The Russians Call South Carolina’s Media Trajectory A Molniya Orbit

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by Smitty

Twitter was awash in SC-1 Jubilation about Sanford’s win over Colbert-Bush:


IowaHawk captures the depth of the opportunity SC-1 has missed for redeeming itself in the eyes of our mainstream media betters:


The trajectory calls to mind something from the Cold War:

I suppose if Sanford has truly repented, and the voters have given him what amounts to a pardon at the polls, then maybe conservatives should think about walking back some of the epithets hurled at the dishonorable scoundrel.
Details at Rare.

My Thing, Your Thing, Our Thing UPDATE: Apparently, It’s #WAR

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Dana Loesch has a piece at Red State about the controversy that ensued when Ben Howe wrote a piece at BuzzFeed criticizing a video from Tea Party Patriots. I never saw the video and didn’t read Howe’s BuzzFeed piece, although friends made me aware that there was some kind of kerfuffle about it.

What. Ever.

Part of the argument was about the fact that Howe used BuzzFeed — perceived as a liberal site — to attack conservatives, to which Loesch responds: “What does it matter where it was published? . . . Buckley published in Playboy. Other conservatives have published in Huffington Post.”

Politics is a team sport played by individuals, and there is no scientific formula for reconciling team success with individual ambition. The teams are so large, in fact, that it is difficult to determine who is responsible for success or failure.

Ronald Reagan said, “You can accomplish much, if you don’t care who gets the credit,” but it seems there are some people who spend all their time claiming credit for success — or blaming others for failure. If I paid attention to half the behind-the-scenes drama I’m aware of, I wouldn’t have time to pay attention to anything else, and there is lots of drama I never find out about simply because it is behind the scenes. So I ignore as much of it as possible, until it hurts my friends or becomes such a distraction that it can’t be safely ignored any longer.

I could write a thousand words about this, but there’s no time. The “roving new media guru Ali Akbar” is anxious to leave South Carolina today and it’s a long drive home.

Headline at Politico: “GOP frets Mark Sanford could blow it”

Yeah. No more time to worry about that now . . .

UPDATE: OK, we stopped on the way home to eat and I hopped online to see what was happening. John Nolte was leading the Breitbart crew on Twitter in #WAR mode:

Donald Douglas at American Power has the necessary links for understanding this Montagues-and-Capulets feud.

Remember that it all started with an article about a video that showed at CPAC three weeks ago.

Fear and Loathing in the Lowcountry UPDATE: Trail Hiker Wins GOP Runoff

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UPDATE 11:15 p.m. ET: Welcome, Instapundit readers! As you surely know by now, 1st District GOP voters chose Mark Sanford by a 57-43 margin over Curtis Bostic. A few quick reactions from my Twitter account:

There be plenty of time to re-hash everything tomorrow, but for now: Please hit the tip jar to help pay for this trip.

UPDATE 7:20 p.m. ET: Liveblogging the special election results.

“I had come up to New Hampshire to write a long thing on the McGovern campaign — but after twelve hours in Manchester I hadn’t seen much to indicate that it actually existed, and I was beginning to wonder what the fuck I was going to write about for that issue. . . .
“[I]n mid-February of 1972 there were no visible signs, in New Hampshire, that the citizenry was about to rise up and drive the swine from the temple. Beyond that, it was absolutely clear — according to the Wizards, Gurus, and Gentlemen Journalists in Washington — that Big Ed Muskie, the Man from Maine, had the Democratic nomination so deep in the bag that it was hardly worth arguing about.
“Nobody argued with the things McGovern said. He was right, of course — but nobody took him very seriously, either . . .”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72

CHARLESTON, S.C.
Curtis Bostic’s congressional campaign is not exactly an uprising by the citizenry determined to “drive the swine from the temple.” No sane person thinks of South Carolina politics as a temple, and these folks prefer their swine hickory-smoked, slow-cooked, and slathered in vinegar-based sauce.

All the Wizards, Gurus and Gentlemen Journalists expect GOP voters in the 1st District to choose Mark Sanford as their nominee in today’s runoff election because, apparently, adultery is more popular than Jesus in South Carolina.

Speaking of Gentleman Journalists, National Review‘s Jim Geraghty recently paid a visit to Hilton Head:

As one Beaufort County resident put it to me, “I’m hearing folks say, ‘My pastor says I should vote for [Bostic]'”

If the counsel of clergy is heeded, the headline on a Bostic victory will be Miracle Upset, but polls indicate that Christianity itself is now viewed as a liability by South Carolina Republicans, unless it is the cheap-grace gospel wherein Mark Sanford’s 2009 embarrassment is shrugged off as something inconsequential that only the Liberal Media Elite care about. There may still be Republicans who take “family values” seriously, but they are neither fashionable nor influential, and none of the Wizards and Gurus think that the anti-adultery vote will amount to a majority in today’s GOP runoff.

The big news today is that Stephen Colbert will host fundraisers for his sister, the Democrat who already enjoys a vast advantage in campaign cash and who can rely on the united efforts of the Democrat Party to win the May 7 special election.

Meanwhile, for the past week or so, various True Conservatives have been trying to convince people that it is a terrible scandal that Ali Akbar was hired to help promote the candidacy of a Marine Corps veteran and homeschooling father of five. It’s even being treated as semi-scandalous that I’m down here providing my customary Neutral Objective Journalism about the campaign. Of course, Hunter S. Thompson committed more felonies before breakfast every day than have ever been alleged against Ali, and I’ve been up-front about my opinion ever since my first March 20 post about this race, “S.C. Primary: Will Tea Party Rally Behind Curtis Bostic Against Mark Sanford?”

Last night, I found myself in a deep discussion with our hostess here — a Christian homeschooling mother of seven — who was mystified by the hatred against Ali. My best explanation is that Ali’s enemies are like Ferris Bueller’s sister:

“Why should he get to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants? Why should everything work out for him? What makes him so goddamn special?”

It is not Ali’s admitted failures, but his successes, that make him the object of so much wrathful resentment. At a time when the GOP is in a condition of demoralized disarray, there is no shortage of idle and disgruntled Republicans who have nothing better to do than to recycle the same old stories, embellished with new allegations, and I’d be happy to ignore it all, if it didn’t have such a harmfully distracting effect.

Some of my blogger friends seem to have forgotten that it was Ali who, as a consultant to the campaign that elected Scott Brown to the Senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy, ensured that bloggers like myself, Da Tech Guy, Ace of Spades and Pamela Geller had prime seating at the victory party that January 2010 night in Boston. Pudding, anyone?

Is there a strain of Charles Johnson-ism in all this? Are there people trying to set themselves up as Supreme Arbiters of who is and is not acceptable inside the Big Tent? And, if so, why are they simultaneously indignant about having Ali Akbar work as a digital strategist, but blithely indifferent to having Mark Sanford become the “face” of the Republican Party?

Some would rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

Having done all in my power to make peace among friends, I find myself in a familiar place: No one asks for my advice, and when I volunteer advice, I’m ignored. People who claim to like and trust me refuse to listen to me, and instead heed the counsel of those who notoriously hate me.

There is no point trying to blame anyone for this state of affairs. It is what it is, and merely explaining it won’t fix it, but the search for scapegoats — the effort to externalize blame by pointing the finger at our enemies as the cause of woe — is not usually a portent of future success. Certainly, my own personal shortcomings explain my failures better than do any injustices I’ve suffered, and I just wish some of my friends could see their situations in the same light, rather than encouraging vindictive dogpile attacks on their chosen enemies — who also just so happen to be my friends.

No point in blame, no hope for redemption, and no rest for the weary this side of the grave. Please hit the tip jar to pay for this bizarre exercise in Fear and Loathing.

 

 

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The Final Push in South Carolina: Candidate Showdown at Aunt Chilada’s

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CHARLESTON, S.C.
It’s about 100 miles to Hilton Head and took me more than two hours today, but I wanted to be there for this event:

Republicans crowded into a Hilton Head restaurant Monday afternoon to hear Republican congressional candidates Curtis Bostic and Mark Sanford discuss issues in their final meeting before Tuesday’s runoff in the 1st District special election.
The two candidates took questions for more than an hour during the “First Monday” forum at Aunt Chilada’s, a day before voters in the Lowcountry district choose the GOP nominee who will face Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Bush in the May 7 special election to fill the House seat vacated by the appointment of Tim Scott to the Senate. . . .

You can read the whole thing. The big national news from SC-1 today was that Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch scrubbed her Twitter account, perhaps in an effort to hide messages that would estrange Republican voters. What does this mean? If Sanford wins Tuesday, Democrat think Colbert Busch can peel off some GOP voters disgusted with Sanford.

The potential for a backlash against Republicans if they nominate Sanford is a factor his supporters refuse to acknowledge. Dana Pico at First Street Journal sees it:

Mr. Sanford’s affair is not the disqualifying issue for me. Rather, the problem is that he showed terrible, terrible judgment in thinking he could get away with his actions, and he abandoned his post!
He abandoned his post. That is disqualifying. . . .
The way he did it, just taking off, virtually guaranteed that the whole smarmy thing would become known; sitting Governors don’t just take off like that. If he had somehow thought that he would get away with it, he’s an idiot. That stupidity alone makes him a lousy candidate; abandoning his post makes him a completely unacceptable one.

 Democrats have a poll showing Colbert Busch leading in this district. Do voters really want to make these cute kids cry?

CURTIS BOSTIC for U.S. CONGRESS

 


 

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