CPAC 2019: Great Minds Think Alike

Posted on | February 27, 2019 | Comments Off on CPAC 2019: Great Minds Think Alike

Tuesday night, while I was working on my latest American Spectator column, I kept getting distracted because my office TV was tuned to the A&E Network’s documentary The Trump Dynasty. On the one hand, this was entertaining and informative. I did not realize, for example, that Trump’s grandfather was a German immigrant who made his fortune in the Yukon Gold Rush. And there was also the information, from a 2014 interview with Trump, that he understands his own success to be significantly influenced by heredity. Seeing life as a Darwinian struggle, Trump believes himself to benefit from genetic superiority. And why shouldn’t he? He is 6-foot-3, which puts him in the 97th percentile of U.S. males, and he is phenomenally healthy. At age 72, he’s never had any heart problems, and if you watch the A & E documentary, you’ll see footage of Trump as a young man in the 1970s to remind you what a remarkable physical specimen he was in his prime, with the fine white teeth of a carnivore and the calm blue eyes of a natural-born killer.

Oh, that word — “killer” — was a compliment in the vocabulary of Trump’s father Fred, a remarkably successful real-estate developer. Fred was one tough taskmaster of a dad, and young Donald was sent to military school because of his unruly behavior. The son learned to appreciate his father’s qualities and, after becoming president of the family business, famously sought to make a name for himself in Manhattan, acquiring a valued mentor, Roy Cohn.

This is where the flaws in A&E’s telling of the Trump tale became apparent to me. In recounting Cohn’s early years as an attorney on the staff of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the producers repeat the liberal myth that McCarthy wrongly accused people and invented Communist conspiracies “from whole cloth.” Anyone who has read M. Stanton Evans’s excellent 2007 book Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies, knows that this is a smear. McCarthy had his flaws, and he made some mistakes, but there really was a national-security problem with Communists and their sympathizers employed in sensitive government jobs, and McCarthy’s investigations unearthed real evidence of this problem.

If they get the McCarthy thing wrong, how many other things did the A&E producers get wrong? As I say, there was a lot in the show that fascinated me — and distracted me from my work — but this glaring error of their smear against McCarthy undermined their credibility.

This morning, Instapundit linked a column by Donald Trump Jr. in which he discussed the media’s demonization of his father’s supporters:

When there’s violence against Trump supporters because of their political beliefs, the media will ignore it until they can’t, and then they’ll downplay it. If that fails, they’ll just proclaim that the Trump supporters had it coming to them because of the “climate of hate” that their political views create.

Yes, and weirdly enough, that’s exactly the point I was laboring to get across in the column I was working on last night:

President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have both been announced as speakers at this week’s 46th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), but I don’t expect to be inside the Gaylord Hotel’s Potomac Ballroom for those speeches. Presidential security is heavy duty, with lines to get through the metal detectors and lots of muscular guys with ear-pieces and holster bulges standing around looking very serious. Instead of dealing with security hassles and ballroom crowds, I’ll be out in front of the Gaylord watching the left-wing protest mobs that predictably show up wherever the president goes. The fact that CPAC is in National Harbor, Maryland, just outside D.C., makes it a short trip for Washington-based protesters, but Joseph Alcoff probably won’t be there.
Alcoff was a reputed leader of Smash Racism DC, an “Antifa” contingent blamed for mobbing the home of Fox News host Tucker Carlson last November and running Texas Sen. Ted Cruz out of a restaurant in September. Last month, however, authorities in Philadelphia filed 17 charges against Alcoff for his alleged role in an attack on two Marines. . . .

You can read the rest at The American Spectator.

Now I’ve got to get packed up for my trip. Yesterday, I sent emails to two dozen tip-jar hitters, thanking them for their contributions and explaining that my wife’s going to hit the roof when she sees my hotel bill for CPAC. The Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Category: CPAC, Donald Trump

Cohen to Testify Before Congress

Posted on | February 27, 2019 | Comments Off on Cohen to Testify Before Congress

Here’s the headline stack on top of the Drudge Report:

Cohen to Testify That Trump Engaged in Criminal Conduct While in Office... Plans to Provide Evidence... Will describe president's 'lies, racism and cheating as private businessman'... New details? Echoes of Watergate... Congressman 'threatens' Cohen over 'girlfriends'... RNC: Have fun in prison! Curtain rises on 3 days of drama... VIEWING GUIDE... CONGRESS CALLS WITNESS CONVICTED OF LYING TO CONGRESS...

Also these two banners:

RATFEST ON CAP HILL

COHEN READY FOR HIS CLOSE-UP

Well, I don’t what Cohen will say or what impact it will have.

My expectation is a big media noise, with little result.

Category: Congress, Donald Trump

In The Mailbox: 02.26.19

Posted on | February 26, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 02.26.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: The Left Thinks We Should Feel Sorry For Smollett
EBL: Remember Iwo Jima, also, Desperately Seeking QAnon
Twitchy: Occasional Cortex Just Noticed Se. Cornyn’s Mussolini Quote
Louder With Crowder: Watch Citizens Eating Out Of Garbage Truck In Socialist Paradise Of Venezuela, also, ABC Disney Pulls Louder With Crowder’s Oscars Live Stream – Now It’s War!

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – No Country For White Men Edition, also, Greasy Pole Podcast #11 – The Binary Breast Diabled Toilet Episode
American Power: Air Force Is Buying New F-15s, also, The Green New Mess
American Thinker: Boys Will Be Boys, Except When They Are Girls
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday, also, Animal’s Daily Conscription News
BattleSwarm: Indian Airstrikes Hit Pakistan, also, Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update
CDR Salamander: Afghanistan & The Long War With Bill Roggio, also, No ENS For LCS
Da Tech Guy: Non-Tweets Under The Fedora For 2/25, also, The Reparations Insanity At Its Core
Don Surber: Why They Hate Green Book, also, Now We Know Why The MAGA Hat Upset Her
Dustbury: Strange Search Engine Queries, also, News From Uncanny Valley
The Geller Report: “Palestinians” Uproot Trees Planted In Memory Of Jewish Girl Raped & Killed By Jihadi, also, Argentina’s Chief Rabbi In Serious Condition After Being brutally Beaten In His Own Home
Hogewash: Dead Naming, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Office Space At 20 – Why It’s As Relevant As Ever
Joe For America: Five House Democrats Took A $60,000 Trip To See Beyonce In South Africa, Paid For By Non-Profit Lobbyists
JustOneMinute: Brexit Fog
Legal Insurrection: Woman Who Attacked MAGA Hat Wearer Turns Out To be An Illegal, Now In ICE Custody, also, Police Believe LGBT Activist Burned Own House Down, Killed Pets For Attention
The PanAm Post: Police Loyal To Maduro Burn Trucks Bearing Humanitarian Aid, also, Sanders Sides With Maduro, Not Venezuelan People
Power Line: In Venezuela, The End Game Approaches, also, Neomi Rao & The Abortion Issue
Shark Tank: FL Congressmen Tapped To Lead RLCC
Shot In The Dark: Conundrum
STUMP: Presidential Mortality, also, Taxing Tuesday
The Jawa Report: Meanwhile On Tatooine
The Political Hat: NV Poised To Allow Hospitals To Tell You To FOAD, also, Does Time Grow Short For Maduro?
This Ain’t Hell: Retirees Can Be Court-Martialed For Crimes Committed After Service, also, Funeral For Former Vietnam MIA Lt. Richard Lannom
Victory Girls: CNN Soils Its Frilly Panties At An Acting SECDEF Actually Shooting Something, also, Four Lessons Hollywood Still Hasn’t Learned, And Won’t
Volokh Conspiracy: Federal Court Rules Male-Only Draft Registration Is Unconstitutional
Weasel Zippers: Biological Male Is Top-Ranked NCAA Women’s Track Star, also, WI Governor Orders Guard Troops Back From Mexican Border
Mark Steyn: The Tinge Of Fake Hate, also, The Continental

Category: Linkagery

SJWs Ruin Everything: Knitting Bloggers in Meltdown Mode Over ‘Social Justice’

Posted on | February 26, 2019 | 1 Comment

What does knitting have to do with politics? Nothing that I can think of, except that everything is political to “social justice warriors” (SJWs) who constantly patrol the Internet in search of something to be angry about.

Kathrine Jebsen Moore at Quillette tells the amazing story of how Karen Templer, a popular figure among online knitting enthusiasts, became a target of SJW rage after she wrote a blog post expressing her excitement about a planned trip to India. This drew a comment from a guy named Alex Klein, who accused Templer of expressing “a colonial/imperialist mindset.” You’ve got to have your “social justice” radar tuned to an astonishingly high frequency to find offense in a middle-aged woman’s writing on a knitting blog, but Klein’s comment seems to have started an avalanche of SJW snowflakes. When another online knitting enthusiast, Maria Tusken, criticized the Internet mob attack on Templer, the mob then turned its rage against Tusken. This is how what’s known as “call-out culture” turns into something like the Red Guards in Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Anyone who objects to the ritual of public denunciation becomes a suspect, accused of “wrong” beliefs, and targeted in the ongoing purge. Kate Heppell, editor of a British knitting magazine, denounced Tusken for questioning the “call-out” of Templer:

The word for this is insanity. Karen Templer never wrote anything “racist” on her blog, and Maria Tusken did not use “hate speech” in defending Templer against false accusations of racism. The entire controversy originated with Templer talking about her trip to India, a country she had dreamed of visiting since childhood. Once the SJW mob got riled up, however, this led to a competition to make the most emphatic denunciation of the “colonial/imperialist mindset” Templer was accused of exhibiting, and anyone who criticized this mob became a target suspected of sympathizing with Templer’s allegedly wrong beliefs.

Kathrine Jebsen Moore says:

In an age in which freedom of speech seems to be under attack in many different spheres of society, heretics to the progressive creed find themselves persecuted ad nauseam by a choir of the self-righteous. This kind of vindictive activism has been described by Jordan Peterson as a hunt for people who dare to disagree. “What’s happening on the radical end of the political spectrum is not good. But the conservatives are too afraid. They’re afraid they will be targeted as individuals, mobbed by the social justice warriors, and taken out,” he said in an interview with the Epoch Times. The writer and activist James Lindsay, meanwhile, told me that campaigns like these are simply “a power grab thinly clothed as a civil rights movement.” . . .
People’s livelihoods are being credibly threatened by this kind of behaviour. “You can be bullied and destroyed,” Tusken told me.

You can’t even be a knitting blogger anymore unless you endorse and promote this kind of insane “social justice” activism.

Category: Racism

WHOA! PayPal Working With SPLC to Enforce Ideological Conformity?

Posted on | February 26, 2019 | 3 Comments

This is very troubling in many ways:

PayPal CEO Dan Schulman admitted during an interview with the Wall Street Journal that PayPal works with the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) when it considers blacklisting conservatives. , , ,
PayPal has blacklisted WikiLeaks, Infowars, conservative commentator and Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes, political activist Tommy Robinson, investigative journalist Laura Loomer, blogger Roosh V, free speech social network Gab, YouTube alternative BitChute, and a black metal music label.
Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch, and Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative were also temporarily blacklisted by PayPal, before being reinstated.

I’m also troubled by Schulman’s statement, “Probably the most important value to us is diversity and inclusion,” in support of his company’s decision to cancel a planned investment in North Carolina due to that state’s so-called “bathroom bill.” Whatever problems anyone might have with the North Carolina law, the boycott of the state was led by transgender activists promoting a very dangerous ideology, so that Schulman and his company have made themselves de facto ideological enforcers. Y’know, Hollywood produces a lot of entertainment I deplore and employs a lot of people whose opinions I despise, but I don’t go around organizing boycotts, nor do I demand government intervention to suppress bad movies, or wage campaigns to destroy the careers of people in show business, because I sincerely believe what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty:

“Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself . . . [Truth] is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”

This is the purest possible expression of a profoundly American principle we usually call “the marketplace of ideas,” and as many injuries as I have suffered in the fight for freedom, I count them as nothing compared to the value of what I seek to preserve. There are perhaps many reasons to criticize what Roosh or Tommy Robinson have said, and people are “permitted freely to contradict them.” Yet it would seem that the Left is unwilling to extend the same liberty to its opponents, and by labeling opposition “hate speech” have succeeded in convincing companies like PayPal to deprive the Left’s opponents of economic support.

One of the great ironies of my career is that I have been criticized for quoting my enemies, in effect publicizing their opinions. Because of the “hive mind” effect in online discourse, where people wall themselves off in cliques and cults and echo-chambers of like-minded lunatics, the kook fringe are not accustomed to having their opinions brought to the attention of people who disagree with them. So when I call attention to, for example, a deranged “queer feminist” Tumblrina, this is often perceived by them as “harassment.” But the person to whom I am calling attention is getting free publicity, and if their ideas were persuasive, my readers might choose to become “queer feminists” themselves. The fact that the Left wishes to silence its critics — that they try to get conservatives banned from social media, and engage in financial blacklisting of antagonists — tells you that the Left understands that its opponents would win in a truly free “marketplace of ideas.”

Well, so long as I maintain my liberty, I’ll continue telling you that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Thanks for your continuing support. If I ever get a chance to speak to Dan Schulman, I’ll try to make him see the light.

Category: Shoe Leather Fund

‘Gender’ and the Question: Why?

Posted on | February 25, 2019 | 1 Comment

One of the problems that has long handicapped conservative opposition to the LGBT movement is that so many conservatives publicly engage in speculative or theoretical discussions of the “why” of sexual perversion, which is easily caricatured as ignorant bigotry. No matter how well-informed your generalizations may be as to the causes of deviant sexual behavior, such discussions will always be deemed “offensive” by LGBT activists, and there is thus nothing to be gained by addressing questions of etiology. Better to refrain from this and just take your stand on a biblical basis, or else in terms of a general opposition to radical egalitarianism, which is really the larger problem. LGBT activists wish to impose policies which will require us to treat things that are different as if they are equal and, however much we may wish to avoid the accusation of “homophobia” (or “transphobia,” as the case may be), there is an obvious problem with such policies. e.g., “Transgender high school athletes spark controversy, debate in Connecticut.” When high school girls are being cheated out of athletic trophies because of a policy that permits “transgender” athletes who are actually male to compete as girls, it becomes obvious why it is impossible to create “equality” between people who are fundamentally different. This is just plain crazy.

One explanation you’ll sometimes hear about young people engaged in deviant sexual behavior is they’re “just doing it for the attention.” Like, a girl “comes out” as bisexual or whatever, and guys will dismiss this as an attention-seeking gesture. Which may be true, but this doesn’t mean she’s not actually a pervert. In other words, the motives for her behavior are less important than the behavior itself. You’re not her therapist, nor are you a research psychologist tasked with understanding the “why” of sexuality, so your dismissive comment is at best irrelevant, and perhaps prejudicial. Saying that a young person is “just going through a phase” of “experimenting” with homosexual behavior is based on the belief that some category of True Homosexuals must exist and that, because the young person “experimenting” this way does not belong to that category, they will eventually revert to normal heterosexuality.

Wake up — behavior defines “sexuality.” The idea that sexual behavior is a matter of identity, an innate trait which we can somehow separate from a person’s behavior, was a fiction created by LGBT activists in order to make “civil rights” a basis for their legal and policy arguments. Only if “sexuality” was recognized as an identity, analogous to race, could a Fourteenth Amendment claim hope to get past the Supreme Court, and you can read Justice Scalia’s dissent in the relevant cases — Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Windsor v. U.S. (2013) and Obergfell v. Hodges (2015) — to find a sound rebuttal of such claims. Whatever your opinion about gay rights may be, the idea that such rights are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution is ludicrous. The Framers had no such intention, nor was any amendment to the Constitution ever intended to make such a guarantee. However, as I say, it was for the purpose of obtaining such legal protection that the whole “born-that-way” explanation of homosexuality (as an identity, rather than as a behavior) was promoted by activists. And widespread acceptance of that explanation is having very dangerous consequences. There’s more at stake than just girls losing athletic trophies; young people are making life-altering decisions because adults are increasingly afraid to say “no” to them.

Last February, I introduced you to a Tampa art student (“Your Homophobia Is a ‘Direct Threat’ of ‘Potential Violence,’ Says Queer Feminist”) whose given name is Gabrielle, who had previously called herself “Gabi” before switching to “Ellie,” but who has since then taken to calling herself “Ulie.” As I explained, Gabrielle claims to “have been professionally diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, bipolar type II, and PTSD,” and is prone to posting provocative selfies with pink hair, a nose ring and a dog collar. The question of how and why Gabrielle got so crazy is less important than the fact of her craziness.

Who approved this 23-year-old art student for transgender hormones and surgery? And why? Isn’t it obvious that a young woman who describes herself as “severely mentally ill” might need psychotherapy rather than testosterone injections and a radical mastectomy? Since when did gender reassignment become standard treatment for crazy people?

Meanwhile, Gabrielle’s suicidal tendencies resulted in her speaking to a “disability counselor” at her university, and she was worried that she might be committed under the Baker Act which, in hindsight, probably would have been the best thing for her. That’s what we used to do with crazy people: “Hey, you’re acting crazy. We’re going to lock you up in the looney bin until you learn to stop acting crazy.” But now? Just give them a sex change, and send them on their way. Also, force everybody to play along with the crazy person’s delusions and pretend that this is all entirely normal. What could possibly go wrong?

In case you’re wondering how a “severely mentally ill” art student is going to pay for hormones and surgery, the answer is: You.

Whether through taxes or higher insurance premiums, the cost for all this transgender treatment is being passed along to everyone else, and the doctors who prescribe such treatment simply don’t care how the bills get paid. Once it was decided people had a “right” to be transgender, they quickly proceeded to discovering they had a “right” to make other people pay for turning them into whatever they imagine they are. So now “free” sex-change treatment is a constitutional right, and I’m sure that’s what the Founding Fathers must have intended, aren’t you?

Category: The Transgender Cult

Bee Stings, Cult Violence, and MAGA Hats

Posted on | February 25, 2019 | Comments Off on Bee Stings, Cult Violence, and MAGA Hats

Did you know this? “Seventy-one percent of the 387 ‘extremist related fatalities in the United States’ from 2008 to 2017 were committed by members of far-right and white-supremacist groups, according the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.” That was published in the New York Times, which failed to do the math — i.e., 28 deaths per year, which “is less than half the annual fatality rate associated with bee and wasp stings,” as David Catron explains at The American Spectator.

Catron further explains that even this 28-per-year estimate of “extremist related fatalities” for “far-right and white-supremacist groups” is probably inflated and, while it is wrong to minimize this threat, it is also wrong to exaggerate it. There have already been 31 black people shot to death in Chicago this year, and it’s not “far-right and white-supremacist groups” who are committing those Chicago homicides.

You may have forgotten Ethan Jackson, the green-haired “non binary” person who attacked a teenager wearing a MAGA hat in Seattle last year, because this kind of politically motivated violence doesn’t show up in “hate crime” statistics or get mentioned in the New York Times. Anything that doesn’t fit the progressive narrative is either ignored or forgotten by the liberal media and therefore most people know nothing about, for example, the “Black Hebrew Israelite” cult. Unless you’ve been reading conservative websites, you wouldn’t realize how this bizarre racial hate group played a role in provoking the incident last month where the Covington Catholic boys were confronted by Nathan Phillips. And you’d have to do a whole lot of Googling to realize that the “Black Hebrew Israelite” movement once spawned a cult that killed 14 people.

Hulon Mitchell Jr., a/k/a “Yahweh ben Yahweh,” made himself the leader of a racial cult — “Broadly classified as a branch of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement” — that became a multimillion-dollar empire in Miami in the late 1980s. “Yahweh ben Yahweh” was sentenced to federal prison in a racketeering case where witnesses testified he urged followers to “kill me a white devil and bring me an ear.” We don’t know how many white people the Yahweh cult’s followers killed. In 1999, a New Jersey man named John Armstrong was indicted for one such murder:

An indictment in Essex County charges that Attilio Cicala, a homeless white man murdered 15 years ago in what appeared to be a street crime, was actually sacrificed by the cult, which believes blacks are the true Jews. Armstrong, who also uses the name Yokonon Israel, allegedly stabbed Cicala repeatedly in the chest and abdomen in the early morning on July 3, 1984, about a block from the group’s former Newark temple on South Orange Avenue a few days before ben Yahweh visited the city.

Sydney Freedberg, a Miami Herald reporter who won a 1991 Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the “Temple of Love” case, wrote a book about it called Brother Love: Murder, Money, and a Messiah, but all that knowledge has been memory-holed by the media in the Trump age, when everybody’s freaking out about “white supremacy” and red hats:

Terry Pierce was shocked this month when he found a man pointing a pistol in his face. “All this over a political statement over a hat,” Pierce told WBKO-TV, after a court hearing about the Feb. 16 incident at a Sam’s Club store in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Police say James Phillips was enraged because Pierce and his wife were wearing red “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) hats and, after a verbal exchange, Phillips pulled a .40-caliber Glock on Pierce. This was no idle threat. Phillips has a criminal record, including a 2013 charge of felony aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and there was a round in the chamber of his Glock, police say. The man in the MAGA hat was dismayed.
“Everybody has a right to believe how they believe,” Pierce said Friday of the frightening encounter, “but you don’t have a right to tell somebody they can’t believe a certain way.”
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about that incident is that it happened in Warren County, Kentucky, which President Trump carried by a 30-point margin in 2016. It’s such a Republican stronghold that the local GOP congressman, Rep. Brett Guthrie, had no Democrat challenger in 2016 and won re-election in 2018 with 67% of the vote against Democrat Hank Linderman. If anti-Trump rage can make it dangerous to wear a MAGA cap in deep-red Bowling Green, how much more dangerous must it be to show support for the president in deep-blue Democrat-dominated urban coastal enclaves? . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.

Category: Crime, Donald Trump, Racism

Rule 5 Sunday: Ski Bunnies!

Posted on | February 25, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Since most of the country seems to be buried in snow at the moment -well, most of my friends and family, at any rate – it seems only appropriate to pick an appetizer from the ranks of young ladies who like to do it in the snow. Here’s a young Utahn out on the slopes.