The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Make the World More Beautiful

Posted on | October 31, 2018 | Comments Off on Make the World More Beautiful

 

 

 

 

This afternoon was beautiful. The fall colors are so brilliant now, and I’m sorry that the pictures above (click to enlarge) don’t do justice to the intensity of the yellow-orange of the hickory trees and the nearly fluorescent red and yellow of the maples. On Facebook, I suggested:

People wondering what they can do to make the world a better place, all I can say is, PLANT MAPLE TREES. For a couple of weeks every fall, the world will be more beautiful.

There is so much ugliness in the world, and people waste too much time and money on things that do nothing to improve the quality of life.

Today, I was bragging on how cute my grandchildren are — I’ve got four of them now — and they, too, make the world more beautiful. Why do you think my wife and I had six kids, anyway? Well, we had the first one, and she was excellent in every way, so we decided to continue improving the overall quality of human life, and had five more excellent children. Given the obviously superior quality of our offspring, the future will be a better place as a result of our, uh, reproductive generosity.

Readers will have to excuse my philosophical and aesthetic mood. After watching CNN for two days, I felt a need to get out this afternoon and enjoy myself a little bit. Speaking of ugliness . . .

CNN isn’t commenting about Don Lemon’s statement that white men represent the biggest terrorist threat in the country. . . .
Lemon said that, “we have to stop demonizing people and realize that the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them.”
A CNN spokeswoman said Wednesday neither Lemon nor the network would speak more about it.

Did I mention that CNN’s ratings are lower than Nickelodeon? Don Lemon works for what is unquestionably the worst cable new network, and he is personally a huge part of what’s wrong with CNN. So when the wheel turns — ratings matter in the TV business — and Don gets fired, and he’s spewing his opinions on some YouTube channel, whose fault will that be? Oh, he’ll probably blame it on racism. But I digress . . .

It was a beautiful autumn afternoon, sunny and warm, and I needed a new pair of dress shoes, since I’ve got a speaking gig this weekend. On the way, I stopped by McDonald’s and had a McDouble, small fries and a chocolate milkshake — $5.91 for lunch. Americans don’t appreciate McDonald’s as much as we should. Because our nation has so many great fast-food chains, we tend to take McDonald’s for granted, but it’s a huge success story, and the food is actually quite good. I mean, the McDouble goes for $1.79, and it’s a tasty burger in its own basic way. Pickles, ketchup, mustard and onions — nothing fancy, but a good burger, really.

After lunch, I went to the outlet mall, but the prices were crazy. Sorry, I’m not paying $80 for a pair of loafers. Also, I had a song stuck in my head, which I’d heard on the piped-in music while eating at McDonald’s. It was a newer song, but the chord progression was the same as Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” and I couldn’t make out the lyrics enough to figure out the title. It was driving me crazy, like this election campaign.

Same Media That Claims Trump Is
Responsible For Pittsburgh Shooting
Freaks Out Over Suggestion That Democrats’
Catch-and-Release Open Borders Policy Is
Responsible for Criminal Alien’s Cop-Killing

That’s a headline from Ace of Spades, and it goes to show why Americans hate the media so much. They’re so one-sided, so nakedly partisan in their allegiance to the Democrat Party, yet pretend to be objective, while condemning as “extremists” anyone who disgrees with them. How are we supposed to have a public-policy debate — about immigration or anything else — while the journalism establishment is constantly smearing anyone who opposes the Democrat agenda? And yet if you complain about the media’s bias, they’ll characterize your criticism as “harassment,” implying that this is evidence of why you’re a far-right neo-Nazi who wants to kill Jews, poison the environment and put black people back in slavery. (Remember, Joe Biden?) But I digress . . .

Having refused to pay $80 for those shoes, I headed over to the big mall and was happy to find a nice pair of tassel loafers for $24.99, which came to $26.49 with sales tax. Congratulating myself on finding this bargain, I decided to go get a cup of coffee at Starbucks and while I was there, I asked the barista, “Hey, there’s this song . . .”

No luck. She didn’t know which song I was talking about, and I felt silly for having asked, but I figured a young person might know.

Did I mention what a beautiful day it was? Despite the annoyances of politics, and this song driving me crazy, I was in a good mood. So I decided to swing by the Goodwill store, where I was able to score a nice gray herringbone tweed sports coat for five bucks. Since I don’t do as much on-the-road work as I used to, my wardrobe’s gotten kind of shabby — who cares what I look like while I’m blogging in the basement? — and a gray sports coat with gray slacks is a sharp look for a speaker. The topic of my speech will be the late Mel Bradford, and here’s a great article he wrote in 1984 for the American Spectator about the Simpson-Mazzoli Bill, the start of our present-day immigration problems.

“The first law of every society, even the condition of its gestures of generosity, is that it put the needs of its own members ahead of the needs of outsiders.”
— Mel Bradford, April 1984

That would probably be considered “hate speech” by CNN. How dare you refer to that caravan from Honduras as “outsiders”? But of course, Professor Bradford was making a general observation about the principles of government, and this is what gets lost in the emotional noise that surrounds the issue of immigrations as it’s now delivered to us by the pious liberals preaching sermons on CNN. The very principles upon which our nation was founded — i.e., the right to self-governance, the protection of the citizen’s life, liberty and property — are ignored by liberals who claim that America, because we are a successful nation, has an obligation to admit anyone from a less-successful nation who wishes to come here. Their open-borders agenda negates not only the interests of Americans, but also their right to make their own laws and to see these laws enforced by the government they’ve elected. When the pious preachers of liberalism at CNN condemn the President for attempting to keep his promise to voters by cracking down on illegal immigration, it is the voters themselves who are the target of this condemnation. It is wrong for you — you lowly ignorant serf, unworthy to shine Don Lemon’s shoes — to wish to protect yourself and your family from the consequences of an open-borders policy. Or such is the underlying premise of the attacks on the President’s policy. But I digress . . .

What Americans want is “domestic tranquility,” one of the great objects of government that our Constitution aimed to secure. We want to be free to enjoy the beauty of our country, and all it has to offer, without being disturbed by angry mobs or being lectured about how “racist” we for wanting to be able to live in peace and safety — “to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.” Of course, I had no tranquility this afternoon, because that song kept burning a hole in my brain, and I didn’t know what it was called or who sang it. So I drove home and had pizza for dinner and tried to forget about it, just like I’d like to forget about this damned election. What I needed was a distraction, like some crime reports from Gwinnett County, Georgia:

Leonardo Ramos (left); Leo Escudero-Olivares (right).

Gwinnett County police are searching for a man accused of rape and other “serious sexual crimes.”
Warrants have been issued for Leo Escudero-Olivares on charges of rape, aggravated sodomy and aggravated sexual battery.
The charges are related to an incident involving a woman who told police Escudero-Olivares physically and sexually assaulted her in a Lawrenceville home.

Six men are wanted on outstanding warrants by the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office on charges including aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer, kidnapping and false imprisonment.
The department regularly releases wanted posters featuring suspects with active warrants for their arrest. The latest poster was released Friday afternoon.
The suspects are:
• Leonardo Ramos, wanted on charges of kidnapping and battery
• Avery Ceasar, wanted on a charge of felony probation violation for aggravated battery
• Darius Devonne Parker, wanted on charges of felony probation violation for possession of cocaine, possession of a firearm during a crime “and more”
• Christopher Tamark Arnold, wanted on charges of aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer “and more”
• Antonio Tyrone McClure, wanted on charges of aggravated assault, theft by shoplifting “and more”
• Christopher Anthony Riley, wanted on charges of felony probation violation for aggravated assault, false imprisonment “and more”

Gosh, I wouldn’t want to demonize any of these guys, because Don Lemon assures me white men are the biggest threat to the country.

All I want is to make the world more beautiful. Is that wrong? And what is more beautiful than a great love song? Yes, I finally decided to Google it — “chord + progression + marvin + gaye + new + song” — and found that Marvin Gaye’s estate is suing Ed Sheeran over his 2014 Grammy-winning song “Thinking Out Loud”:

 

Ed Sheeran is facing a $100 million lawsuit accusing the singer-songwriter of copying Marvin Gaye’s 1973 hit “Let’s Get It On” on his 2014 song “Thinking Out Loud,” TMZ reported.
The suit was filed by Structured Asset Sales, a company that owns one-third of the copyright to “Let’s Get It On.”
“According to the lawsuit, Sheeran’s song has the same melody, rhythms, harmonies, drums, bassline, backing chorus, tempo, syncopation, and looping as ‘Let’s Get it On,'” TMZ reported.
Sheeran was also sued over “Thinking Out Loud” in 2016. The family of Ed Townsend, a cowriter on Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” sued Sheeran, arguing that “Thinking Out Loud” lifted the melody, harmony, and other rhythmic components from Gaye’s track.
Sheeran responded to the 2016 suit in documents obtained by TMZ last week. He reportedly claimed that the chord progressions and drum patterns of the two songs were “extremely commonplace” and that similar elements in “Let’s Get It On” were in the public domain and unprotectable.

It is a fact that you can’t copyright a simple chord progression, otherwise everybody who ever wrote a 12-bar blues tune would be paying royalties to the estate of W.C. Handy or Robert Johnson. The melody of Ed Sheeran’s song is sufficiently different from “Let’s Get It On” that I think any copyright infringement suit would be difficult to win, but c’mon, Ed — fair is fair, and the inspiration is pretty damned obvious. A settlement, giving some percentage of the royalties and songwriting credit to Gaye and his co-writer would be fair. Maybe you give up 15% or 25% of what you’ve made from the song, but your conscience would be clear, and I might even forgive you for making me spend all afternoon wondering what the heck that song was, just six days before a crucial election.

October comes to an end, and soon the leaves will be gone and the chill winds of winter will be blowing. Meanwhile, however, I’ve got to finish writing my speech, and also it’s time to remind readers once again of the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

 

Category: Election

Good-Bye, Ms. Abrams: Georgia Democrat Calls for Banning AR-15 Rifles

Posted on | October 31, 2018 | Comments Off on Good-Bye, Ms. Abrams: Georgia Democrat Calls for Banning AR-15 Rifles

 

Well, if this doesn’t guarantee her defeat, I don’t know what will:

In an interview on “The View” Tuesday morning, Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for Georgia governor, called for AR-15 rifles to be banned.
When asked if she supports banning AR-15-style rifles, Abrams said civilians should be banned from using them.
“I do not believe like weapons of mass destruction like the AR-15 belong in civilian hands,” she said. “I think it should be prohibited from civilian use. I have shot an AR-15, and I think you probably have too, and while it’s an amazing amount of power, it also is an amazing amount of destruction, and there is very little that can be done to protect vulnerable communities when the AR-15 is present.”
AR-15s are the most popular gun in America. When asked if she supports confiscating weapons already in the hands of civilians, Abrams dodged the question and repeated talking points about wanting to ban “assault weapons.”

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) You talk about a get-out-the-vote message for every gun-owning good ol’ boy in Georgia, this is it, buddy. If I were to repeat what the bubbas are probably saying about Stacey Abrams up in Dalton and Dawsonville, the SPLC would accuse me of hate speech. Not that I care about the SPLC’s opinions, of course, but my Mama taught me never to say certain words. It’s ill-mannered and un-Christian. However, if Ms. Abrams thinks she’s going to take guns away from rednecks, she’ll have problems much worse than mere rude language.



 

 

Category: Election, Georgia

‘Hate Speech,’ CNN and George Soros

Posted on | October 31, 2018 | Comments Off on ‘Hate Speech,’ CNN and George Soros

Republican campaign ad in Minnesota.

Yesterday, I switched my office TV to CNN, a psychological hazard I try to undertake at least once a week. Yes, it’s a mental-health risk to immerse myself into that bizarre alternative universe — a land where Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon are considered objective journalists — but if I don’t occasionally watch CNN, how can I know what’s going on in the deranged minds of Democrats? As much as we would like to ignore CNN, ignoring them is in some sense as dangerous as ignoring anti-Semitic kooks like Robert Bowers. The third-rated cable-news network is like a fringe extremist cult compound on the outskirts of town, and you never know when the cult leader might decide to start Armageddon.

Hey, has anyone mentioned that CNN has not one but two primetime anchors who are homosexual? Isn’t that odd? Like, you’ve got three hours of programming between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET, and two of those hours are anchored by Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon? Whatever the percentage of the homosexual population, it’s certainly less than 67%, so why this unusual over-representation of gay men on CNN primetime?

We’re not supposed to mention such things — it’s homophobia, I guess — but the fact that we’re not allowed to talk about it doesn’t mean people don’t notice. CNN is gayer than the Castro Street Pride Fair, which may explain why the network’s ratings are lower than Nickelodeon and the Hallmark Channel. Given a choice between Don Lemon and reruns of Spongebob Squarepants, which would you watch? But I digress . . .

Trump’s Embrace of Racial Bigotry Has
Shifted What Is Acceptable in America

That’s the headline on a Slate column by Jamelle Bouie, and what does it mean? Trump’s rhetorical style is abrasive, yes, but he isn’t anti-black. In fact, both polling data and anecdotal information indicate that black people like Trump’s blunt tell-it-like-it-mode of communication more than they like the controlled, scripted GOP talking-points style of most Republican politicians. Trump is a wealthy businessman and guess what? A lot of black people admire wealth and success. Why shouldn’t they?

Trump is a white guy who doesn’t feel guilty about being white, and that’s most of what the “racial bigotry” narrative is about. Liberals believe it’s wrong to be white, that white people should be embarrassed by their whiteness, and Trump refuses to play along with that game.

The other thing is, of course, immigration.

 

Let’s not mince words here: Democrats want to import Third World immigrants because they believe this will enable Democrats to take over the federal government, the same way they have done in California. Remember that 25 years ago, California was a GOP-controlled state, but as the Hispanic population rapidly grew, Democrats took over. California is now 39% non-Hispanic white, 39% Hispanic, 15% Asian and 7% black, and the white minority is shrinking rapidly. Every year, about 140,000 more people leave California than move there from elsewhere in the U.S., and if you think the exodus of white people from California is good for the people (of whatever ethnic background) left behind there, you’re a fool. The only people really benefiting from California’s demographic transition are the Democrats gaining more and more political power.

California is in effect a one-party state, where Democrats control every statewide office, both houses of the legislature, and the vast majority of elected county and municipal offices. This has consequences.

Have you noticed that Democrats keep reminding us Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016? Why do you think that is? California. What happens if you subtract California’s numbers from the total?

U.S. Popular Vote, 2016

Hillary Clinton ……. 65,853,514
Donald Trump ……. 62,984,828

California Vote, 2016

Hillary Clinton …….. 8,753,788
Donald Trump …….. 4,483,810

U.S. Minus California, 2016

Donald Trump …….. 58,501,018
Hillary Clinton …….. 57,099,726

In other words, the Democrat takeover of California — which is entirely due to the demographic shifts produced by immigration — accounts for all of Clinton’s popular-vote advantage in 2016.

So when you see liberals denouncing Trump for “racial bigotry” because of his outspoken opposition to the Democrats’ open-borders agenda, you understand that this is because cracking down on illegal immigration is a threat to the Democrats’ political power. Democrats want to do to America what they’re doing to California — turn it into a Third World hellhole — and Trump is trying to stop them. That is “racial bigotry.”

 

Maybe the average Trump voter hasn’t crunched the numbers and done the kind of analysis I’ve shown here, but they have an instinctive sense that the Democrats’ immigration agenda is harmful to their interests. Liberals will call this “racial bigotry,” too, I suppose — “How dare those working-class people in Iowa vote to defend their self-interest?”

For many years, the partisan lines in the debate over immigration policy were obscured by prominent open-borders Republicans like John McCain, and by such so-called “conservative” intellectuals as the pro-amnesty editors of the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard. One reason Trump was able to win over working-class voters in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan was because he didn’t follow that script. Like every other Republican who’s won a presidential election since 1968, Trump is demonized by liberals as Hitler, and anyone who voted for Hitler is obviously a Nazi, so the hate that liberals direct against Trump is actually aimed at you, the Republican voter. And anyone who points this out is, of course, engaging in “hate speech”:

Americans are no longer a free people, if debate on major public-policy issues is effectively criminalized, which is what the Democrats and their allies are attempting to do with regard to our immigration policy. We are now being told in effect that it is “hate speech” to express opposition to the open-borders agenda of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and such of their billionaire donors as George Soros. Democrats and their media allies have recently taken to declaring that it is a “dog whistle” of racism and anti-Semitism for any Republican even to mention the name of Soros in connection with the immigration issue. If you don’t think the United States should throw open its borders to welcome the caravan of Honduran migrants now headed north through Mexico, and if you call attention to how Democrats are cheering on this horde of would-be foreign invaders, well, you must be some kind of Nazi who wants to kill Jews. Or at least that’s the general drift of liberal rhetoric in the final week of the midterm election campaign.
CNN has spent the past few days insinuating that the gunman who murdered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue was incited to this act by President Trump. Republicans are not allowed to object to CNN’s one-sided coverage, however, because Florida madman Cesar Sayoc also hated CNN, and therefore anyone who criticizes the network is deemed a potential threat to public safety. Between the Pittsburgh shooter and the Florida bomber, basically anything said in favor of Republicans (or against Democrats) is now considered “hate speech” in the eyes of liberals. This is especially the case when it comes to immigration. Ever since the migrant caravan set off from Honduras, announcing their intention to march all the way to the United States, Democrats have been accusing the GOP of “exploiting” the issue. What are Republicans supposed to do? Pretend they don’t notice the lawless intentions of these so-called “refugees”? . . .

Read the rest of my latest column for The American Spectator.



 

 

Category: CNN, Donald Trump, George Soros, Immigration, Media Bias, Racism

Why Do We Know Almost Nothing About Pittsburgh Gunman Robert Bowers?

Posted on | October 30, 2018 | 3 Comments

 

There has been a remarkable failure of journalism in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. The gunman, 46-year-old Robert Bowers, remains a cipher. Except for the fact that he posted anti-Semitic rants on the Internet, worked as a truck driver and lived alone in an apartment, we know nothing about Bowers. Who are his parents? Does he have any siblings? Girlfriends? Did he have any hobbies other than hating Jews?

We know none of the answers to such questions. The guy’s a complete mystery. If there are any reporters trying to fill in the background on this guy, so far they have produced nothing, and so the question of why and how this guy turned into a mass murderer cannot be answered.

This bothers me, for some reason. Think about any previous mass murder or terrorist attack — the Boston Marathon bombings, the Parkland massacre, etc. — and remember how within 72 hours we had a vast pile of biographical background on the killers. Obviously, we want to know this information, since it helps us understand the motives. What created the monster? What are the warning signs? Who is vulnerable to online appeals to hate? But in this case, we’ve got nothing.

Three reporters for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette worked on a profile of Bowers, who dropped out of Baldwin High School sometime after his junior year. His photo appears in the school’s 1989 yearbook, however: “He is not listed as taking part in any clubs or activities, and classmates reached by the newspaper said they had no recollection of him.”

A total blank — a neo-Nazi NPC, you might say.

The blankness of Robert Bowers should disturb us. Evidently, any random loner — the quiet, nondescript high-school dropout with no friends or family — could log onto the Internet, find some kind of hate that appeals to him, and become a mass murderer. And in all the world of journalism, nobody except some reporters for the local newspaper will expend any effort to figure out what went wrong in this guy’s life. Why? Because they can explain it all with one word: Trump.

That’s the answer, you see. There is no need to examine Robert Bowers’ biographical background in search of an explanation, because the reasons are ready-made: Trump, and “hate” sites on the Internet.

Everything on CNN for the past 72 hours has been about how President Trump’s “rhetoric” allegedly incited the “climate” that led to the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, depiste the fact that the gunman explicitly expressed disdain for Trump, e.g., “Trump is a globalist, not a nationalist. There is no #MAGA as long as there is a kike infestation.”

Because I am not an anti-Semite, my habit is to ignore such rhetoric and to avoid the people who spew it, and I think most conservatives practice this ignore-and-avoid strategy. Who has time to pay attention to such people? I’m too busy keeping up with the craziness of feminists, but I have to say that Robert Bowers succeeded in calling my attention to something I’d never noticed, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society:

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, or HIAS, known for its resettlement work in the United States and internationally, is one of the oldest refugee protection agencies in the country. The organization became part of the national conversation Saturday after the man accused of shooting and killing 11 at a synagogue in Pittsburgh appeared to have referred to the group online.
In a post on the social network Gab, the accused shooter, Robert Bowers, 46, linked to a directory of synagogues participating in a HIAS event, National Refugee Shabbat, saying he “appreciated” the list. As part of the elaborate anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to which he subscribed — which prosecutors say motivated his crime — Bowers claimed that HIAS was working to bring people to the United States to do violence. . . .
Founded in 1881 as a storefront on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the organization began as a mission to help Eastern European Jews who were fleeing anti-Semitism and war. . . .
In 1980, HIAS became an official voluntary agency for the State Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, joining eight other organizations, which include other religious-based groups like Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services and the Church World Service.
The U.S. government refers immigration cases to HIAS, which works with 20 sites and affiliates across the country to help resettle refugees. Most of the people working on the ground to deploy resources are associated with Jewish family centers.
Nearly two decades ago, it began to help non-Jewish immigrants from countries like the Republic of Congo, Afghanistan and Syria — mainly resettling migrants from war-torn countries and providing them with housing and financial and job assistance.
“As our president likes to say, ‘We used to help refugees because they were Jewish but now we help refugees because we’re Jewish,’” [HIAS spokesman Bill] Swersey said.
HIAS is also involved in immigration causes around the world through its 10 international offices. The recent issues at the U.S.-Mexico border and a migrant caravan have also become part of their work.
“As far as the migrant caravan goes, we are actively advocating for asylum seekers,” Swersey said.

Whoa! I had no idea about this group. Did you?

Here we have an organization “actively advocating” for open borders — fanatics committed to preventing the United States from enforcing its immigration laws — and the only people who seem to have noticed were Jew-haters like this high-school dropout from Pittsburgh.

Of course, there are all kinds of tax-exempt non-profits, including liberal Catholic and Protestant groups, doing the same thing as HIAS, but the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists either ignore those other organizations or claim that they are somehow “controlled” by Jews. This is how ignorance, combined with the liberal bias (and/or laziness) of journalists, creates a void from which dangers emerge.

Liberal reporters don’t want Americans to know about the network of tax-exempt non-profit organizations that are working to subvert our national sovereignty, which is why you’re never going to see a critical examination of these groups on CNN. Jew-haters, however, are going to dig around obsessively and even a blind pig finds the occasional acorn, which yields the remarkable intersection of (a) a little-known fact that is actually important in the context of current public-policy debates, and (b) a dimwit kook whose response to this information is to take his guns to a synagogue and murder a bunch of innocent people.

Well, mass-murder is a bad idea and I’m against it, but the frustration that seems to have inspired Robert Bowers — why is everybody ignoring the role of HIAS in flooding the United States with Third World “refugees”? — is understandable. This organization that was founded to help relocate persecuted Jews (e.g., HIAS brought Google founder Sergey Brin’s family here from the Soviet Union in 1979) has been hijacked for other purposes, and is now “actively advocating” on behalf of this lawless caravan from Honduras. Nobody in the world of media or politics seems interested in discussing this unpleasant subject, which is why the only people talking about it were dimwit Jew-haters.

Shouldn’t intelligent critics of the open-borders lobby stop ignoring this? And shouldn’t conservative Jews be outraged that groups like HIAS are damaging the reputation of Jewish Americans, including patriotic citizens who don’t want to see their country overrun by a lawless horde of “refugees”? This is a shanda fur die goyim.

If I, as a righteous Gentile, am obligated to denounce anti-Semitic idiots like Robert Bowers, I should hope that Jews would feel a duty to reciprocate by denouncing those left-wing Jewish idiots (like the people running HIAS) who do things that inspire anti-Semitism.

By the way, my friend Jeff Dunetz wants you to know that hating George Soros doesn’t make you an anti-Semite, and this NRCC ad in Minnesota makes clear why every American should hate George Soros:

 

One of the problems that has plagued the Republican Party for more than half a century — going back as far as the 1964 Goldwater campaign, at least — is the unfortunate perception that, because conservatives are “right-wing,” they are somehow therefore analogous to Nazis. This smear has been reiterated so endlessly that most Republicans have grown weary of debunking it, but every once in while something happens that forces conservatives to confront this decades-old libel directly. The blankness of Robert Bowers’ biography, a mysterious opaque void which no journalist seems interested in penetrating, has given rise to such an occasion.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

 

Category: Immigration, Media Bias, Racism

Michael Moore Releases Sayoc Video, Ruins It With Idiotic Anti-Trump Sermon

Posted on | October 29, 2018 | Comments Off on Michael Moore Releases Sayoc Video, Ruins It With Idiotic Anti-Trump Sermon

 

In February 2017, the crew of Michael Moore’s latest documentary captured about three minutes of video showing Cesar Sayoc as part of the crowd at a Trump rally in Florida. Now that Sayoc has been arrested for mailing more than a dozen pipe bombs to Trump’s enemies, this video is very interesting. However, Moore accompanied the release with 800 words of his own commentary, which deserves a thorough fisking:

My crew first encountered Cesar Sayoc, the mail bomber/terrorist, 20 months ago when we went down to Melbourne, Florida, to film Trump’s first “Trump 2020 Re-election Rally” — just one month after his inauguration. My direction to my producer Basel Hamdan and our longtime collaborator Eric Weinrib was to NOT film Trump, but rather only film the people who came out to see him. My feeling was, after one month in office, we didn’t need to hear anything more from Trump’s mouth — we already knew everything we needed to know about him.
Who we needed to understand were our fellow Americans, lost souls full of anger and possible violence, easily fed a pile of lies so large and toxic that we wondered if there would ever be a chance that we could bring them back from the Dark Side.
Our footage of Mr. Sayoc would never make it into the final cut of what would be the film that is now in its last week in cinemas across America. But I’d like to share it with you, if only to give you a momentary glimpse of him in action (all are free to use this video and share it).
You’ve seen the photos of him on the news over the past couple days — a slight, normal, everyday American. But those are from before. Here with our footage I can show you what he had actually become — overdosed on steroids in what looks like some desperate attempt to hang on to what was left of his manhood. Men, people like Cesar have been led to believe, were and are under attack by the likes of Hillary and Michelle and all those “feminazis” who’ve had but one mission: political castration. The theft of power from the patriarchy that had been in place for 10,000 years. The end of men.

(Question: Who appointed Michael Moore, a wealthy film director who whose ex-wife accused him of cheating her out of her fair share of their compnay’s profits, as a feminist spokesman?)

Here in this outtake from “Fahrenheit 11/9” is 3 minutes and 38 seconds of raw, unedited footage — and you can see what Sayoc had become by early 2017, his body grossly deformed into what he thought a man should be, muscles the size of basketballs, he’s wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt, holding a big anti-CNN sign and, along with his fellow Trumpsters, is yelling at the journalists who had gathered in the media pen. You’ll see him two or three times, each for a few seconds, but if you pause on him you will also see something profound. Underneath his threatening Hulk-like exterior, there is fear in his eyes and, for a quick moment, you can see he is already gone, a lost dog with no direction home.
What do we do with the thousands of other Cesar Sayocs? They have been told by Trump that they are at war — WAR! — against the rest of us, the vast, vast majority who believe climate change is real, who state without equivocation that women are equal citizens with an absolute right to control their own reproductive organs, who have seen how the free enterprise system is a hoax designed to destroy the middle class, and who demand that all people have a right to easily cast their votes without any interference. Cesar and his bros ARE at war, against all these things, against us, the majority, and they are at war inside of and against themselves. This is why they will lose, but not before they take a few of us with them.

(Notice the sloppy guilt-by-association smear. Everyone who voted for Trump — about 63 million people — is complicit in his crime. If you generalized that way about any other group, you would be fairly be accused of fomenting prejudice. Are all black people complicit in the murders committed by black gang-bangers in Chicago? Furthermore, how is it that free enterprise, without which there wouldn’t even be a middle class, “is a hoax to destroy the middle class,” according to Moore? But never mind . . .)

Needless to say I was a bit shaken to see that Sayoc had placed a photo of me with a crosshairs target over my face on the side of his van. Over the past 15 years I have encountered men like him many times. I stopped counting the death threats long ago. I’ve been assaulted more than a half-dozen times (men with knives, clubs, hot scalding coffee thrown at my face) — and then there was the man who was making a fertilizer bomb (a la Oklahoma City) to blow up my house, only to be thwarted by his AK-47 which went off accidentally. A neighbor heard it, called the cops, and off to prison he went.
So none of this week’s abhorrence surprises me in the least — except for the fact that it is the President himself who is the “what-me?” instigator of it.

(Again, Moore uses a guilt-by-association smear to blame Trump as the “instigator” of political violence in a way that any liberal would reject as false were it done with, say, “Black Lives Matter” maniac Micah Xavier Johnson, who shot five police officers in Dallas, or James Hodgkinson, the gunman who shot Rep. Steve Scalise and targeted other Republican congressmen. Violent extremists are usually aligned, however remotely, with either the Left or the Right, but no one in the mainstream media ever acknowledges that Democrats are at least as guilty of inciting left-wing violence as any Republican is of inciting violence on the Right.)

Maybe someday I’ll get a chance to sit down with Mr. Sayoc and break bread and ask him “why me?” on his van? Because of this target he put on me, the police and security people were looking on Friday to see if a package had been sent to me and, if so, is it still somewhere in the postal delivery system. So far, so good!

(In other words: “It’s all about me! Pay attention to me! Me! Me!”)

Today we grieve over the latest loss of life this weekend in Pittsburgh. As it was when fascism started to spread in the last century, it begins with just a few thugs committing random acts of violence against the people whom their leader has told them to hate. Yet no matter what awful events await us in the coming days or weeks, we will not be deterred from our singular mission: The electoral tsunami of voters we are bringing to the polls on November 6th to end this madness.
— Michael Moore

Michael Moore’s history of 20th-century fascism is false. It did not begin “with just a few thugs,” but with an ex-Communist, Benito Mussolini, leading a march on Rome and staging a coup d’etat in 1922. Inspired by Mussolini’s example, Hitler attempted a similar coup in Munich (the “Beer Hall Putsch“) in 1923. So it wasn’t “a few thugs committing random acts of violence,”  but rather organized mass movements, which signaled the spread of fascism in Europe. Whenever I hear a dimwit reciting the kind of false history Moore peddles here, it makes me angry because, of course, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.

The rise of fascism in the 20th century was a result of particular historical circumstances, and happened in a certain way, and it is wrong to ignore the details of this history in order to make possible a partisan propaganda claim (which is what Moore’s misleading characterization is). What is generally neglected by such tendentious myth-makers, is the role played in the rise of European fascism by (a) the four-year nightmare of World War I, and (b) the Bolshevik Revolution. When the war ended, the millions of demobilized troops returned to civilian life provided leaders like Mussolini and Hitler the source of manpower for their paramilitary gangs, the “Blackshirts” in Italy and the “Brownshirts” in Germany. The success of Lenin’s Bolsheviks in seizing power in Russia showed how easily a disciplined revolutionary party could overthrow a democratic government. The widespread political disillusionment and economic problems of Europe after the First World War, combined with technological advancements (e.g., telephone, radio, automobiles, airplanes), helped make possible the totalitarian horrors of the Third Reich. It certainly did not begin with “just a few thugs committing random acts of violence,” and it is an astonishing falsehood to compare a lone kook like Cesar Sayoc to the followers of totalitarian leaders like Hitler and Mussolini. Whatever you might say about Ernst Rohm and Heinrich Himmler, the violence they ordered was never “random.”

Trying to imply, as Moore does, that there is some kind of analogy between Trump and Hitler is not only false, but dangerous. The lone kook — an irresponsible fool using violence as as means of obtaining his 15 minutes of fame — is obviously a different creature than the brownshirt, a member of a paramilitary unit following explicit orders. Only a phenomenally stupid person could look at a deranged loner and imagine such a person to be analogous to one of Hitler’s stormtroopers. To assert such an analogy is to endorse the kook’s delusion, since what the loner believes is that he can achieve extraordinary significance by his crime.

Michael Moore lacks the self-awareness to see what’s wrong with his theory. He posts video of Cesar Sayoc in a crowd of Trump supporters chanting “CNN sucks!” If all of these Trump supporters were macho guys pumped up on steroids, or if other members of the crowd had also engaged in political terrorism, maybe Moore would have a point. But there are all kinds of people in that crowd, including pro-Trump women, yet so far as we know, Sayoc is the only one to have committed any crime. If all Trump’s supporters are “lost souls full of anger,” as Moore implies, why haven’t all 63 million of them resorted to violent terrorism?

Something else Michael Moore won’t mention: The copycat factor. I’m willing to bet $20 that one of the things that provoked the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter was the news coverage of Sayoc’s spree and subsequent arrest. Was it a coincidence that the synagogue was attacked after four days of non-stop mail-bomb coverage on cable news? I don’t think so, just like it’s not a coincidence that school shootings tend to happen in clusters, with news coverage of each massacre inspiring the next. Whenever the cable-news channels go into saturation-coverage mode of a politically-charged story, it will tend to provoke strong reactions on both sides. Think about the August 2014 riot in Ferguson, Missouri — basically a made-for-TV performance with CNN as the producer. Three months later, Republicans won a majority in the Senate. Not a coincidence. More and more Americans are becoming wise to how media bias works, and understand that CNN is Democrat propaganda, which is why (a) CNN’s anti-Trump agenda didn’t stop him in 2016, and (b) that 2017 crowd in Florida was chanting “CNN sucks!”

 

Just watch the video and ask yourself, “Whose fault is it that Republican voters hate the media?” Michael Moore would have you believe that CNN is completely innocent of any accusation of bias, and that the only reason for that crowd’s hatred of CNN is Donald Trump.

By the way, did I mention that Michael Moore is an idiot? Because that’s really the only point I was trying to make, you know.



 

 

Category: Media Bias

Brazil: ‘Far-Right’ Bolsonaro Wins

Posted on | October 29, 2018 | 1 Comment

 

One of the things I despise most about the media’s liberal bias is the dishonest way they make it seem as if there is no such thing as the Left in politics, so that an extremist like Barack Obama — a companion of radical terrorist Bill Ayers, and a congregant at Jeremiah Wright’s anti-white, anti-Semitic, anti-American church — is normalized, whereas anyone who opposes such extremism is labeled “right wing.” This business of ideological labeling serves the partisan interests of the Democrats, whose policies and candidates are always depicted as mainstream, whereas Republicans are subjected to rhetorical demonization simply for advocating common-sense policies. Meanwhile, in Brazil . . .

Far-right lawmaker Jair Bolsonaro won Brazil’s presidential election on Sunday, riding a wave of frustration over corruption and crime that brought a dramatic swing to the right in the world’s fourth-largest democracy.
With 94 percent of ballots counted, Bolsonaro had 56 percent of the votes in the run-off election against left-wing hopeful Fernando Haddad of the Workers Party (PT), who had 44 percent, according to the electoral authority TSE.
“We cannot continue flirting with communism … We are going to change the destiny of Brazil,” Bolsonaro said in an acceptance address in which he vowed to carry out his campaign promises to stamp out corruption after years of leftist rule.
The former army captain’s rise has been propelled by rejection of the leftist PT that ran Brazil for 13 of the last 15 years and was ousted two years ago in the midst of a deep recession and political graft scandal. . . .
Many Brazilians are concerned that Bolsonaro, an admirer of Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship and a defender of its use of torture on leftist opponents, will trample on human rights, curtail civil liberties and muzzle freedom of speech.

At least Reuters is willing to admit that Brazil was under “leftist rule” for more than a decade, which is something the U.S. media have never admitted about the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Obama. Fortunately for Americans, the separation of powers in our Constitution means that Congress can exercise some restraint on presidential power, and in both 1994 and 2010, Republicans won midterm elections in reaction to the left-wing policies of newly-elected Democrat presidents.

One reason Democrats never seem to accept that they’ve gone too far — they keep drifting more and more to the Left, no matter how many elections they lose as a result — is simply because the news media refuses to tell the truth about Democrats and their extreme ideology. And anyone who does tell the truth is condemned as “right wing.”

Far be it from me, of course, to defend the “use of torture on leftist opponents” of Brazil’s former military government. It’s not my place to lecture Brazil on its policies during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was sponsoring radical leftist revolutionaries around the world, including here in the United States. Perhaps the Brazilians would criticize us for not torturing our “leftist opponents,” and why start that argument? Brazil is our friend, and we don’t want to argue with our friends.

Criminal violence in Brazil has been out of control in recent years. There were more than 60,000 murders in the country last year, and seven of the world’s 20 most dangerous cities are in Brazil. That’s right — the murder rate in those cities is worse than Baltimore (#20 on the list) and in four of those cities, it’s even worse than St. Louis (#13).

Bolsonaro has promised to legalize private firearms in Brazil: “Every honest citizen, man or woman, if they want to have a weapon in their homes — depending on certain criteria — should be able to have one.” So now the bad guys (who already have illegal guns) will have to worry that their would-be victims might be armed. That’s good, and as for Bolsonaro’s “leftist opponents” . . . Well, one of my favorite scenes in Scarface is when Tony Montana is being held in an immigration camp, having arrived in the U.S. during the Mariel boatlift from Cuba.

 

His buddy Manny tells Tony that one of Castro’s former Communist henchmen has just arrived in the camp. The Communist “was one of the top dogs for Fidel in the early days,” Manny explains, “but Castro felt he couldn’t trust him anymore, y’know, and threw him in jail. But while he was on top, he tortured a few guys to death.”

A brother of one of the Communist’s victims escaped Cuba and is now a “rich guy in Miami,” who can arrange for Tony to be released and granted permanent U.S. residency — the coveted “green card” — if he will kill the Communist. Tony’s reply is a Cold War classic: “You tell your guys in Miami, your friend, it’d be a pleasure. I kill a Communist for fun, but for a green card? I gonna carve him up real nice.”

Was Tony Montana “far right”? No, he just knew what a Communist was, which was why he knew what a Communist deserved. Selah.



 

 

Category: Brazil, Media Bias

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Wombat Hospitalized, Could Use Your Help

Posted on | October 29, 2018 | 2 Comments

 

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The first time I met Wombat — in 2010, as I recall — I was struck by the enormous size of the man. It’s like meeting an NFL lineman in real life. You see them on TV and know they are unusually large human beings, but actually being in their physical presence is startling. How tall is Wombat? I dunno. Maybe six-foot-four, and not skinny, either.

So we met up in D.C., and went to dinner with some of my GOP operative buddies, and not long thereafter, Wombat became a co-blogger. One day in September 2010, we sat down and came up with the plan for the “Live at Five” daily updates, subsequently segued into the “In the Mailbox” feature and, when Smitty was deployed to Afghanistan, Wombat also took over duty on the weekly FMJRA post and Rule 5 Sunday. Furthermore, Wombat was tasked with wielding the Mighty Troll Hammer, preventing moonbats from disruptive behavior in the comments.

As a valuable member of the blog team, Wombat has been so effective that I tend to take his work for granted — it just predictably happens, day after day, like the sun rising in the East. So when there was no “In the Mailbox” feature on Friday, I didn’t panic, but I did notice. Then when there was no FMJRA or Rule 5 Sunday post, I was like, “What happened to Wombat? Did he get kidnapped by a gang of Thai hookers?” The man lives in Las Vegas, a place notorious for weirdness, and who knows?

After going out to eat at Taco Bell with my two youngest kids Sunday afternoon, I lay down for what I expected to be a short nap and woke up at midnight and noticed there was still no Wombat on the blog. That’s when I checked Facebook and discovered that he’d been hospitalized Friday with an infection and other health problems. He’s still got Internet access via his phone — you can wish him well on Twitter — but evidently the doctors won’t allow him to actually blog from his hospital room.

Readers must help restore Wombat’s health before the moonbats discover he’s been sidelined and trolls run amok in the comments.

The man is a military hero, you know — author of What Did You Do in the Cold War, Dad? If it hadn’t been for the service of troops like Wombat (a Russian-language specialist in the Army Security Agency) the Red Army would have rampaged through the Fulda Gap or the Commies could have subverted our government and then who knows? We might be living under a totalitarian regime nearly as frightening as North Korea.

Or maybe even California.

Wombat helped win the Cold War, and kept the Bolshevik menace from conquering the world (except California, and they did that to themselves.)

In September, Wombat started a GoFundMe page to help with his moving expenses, and I urge readers to go contribute there.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

 

Category: Fear. Loathing.

Crazy People Are Dangerous: Cornell Student Takes LSD, Does Bad Things

Posted on | October 29, 2018 | Comments Off on Crazy People Are Dangerous: Cornell Student Takes LSD, Does Bad Things

 

Saano Murembya of Okemos, Michigan, was a freshman at elite Cornell University (annual cost of attendance, $70,004 including room and board) when he reportedly took a dose of LSD last Sunday, Oct. 21. The effects of LSD are unpredictable, particularly when you’re talking about street drugs, where the contents and dosage levels are uncertain:

A cross country athlete from Okemos has been charged with attempted sexual abuse and unlawful imprisonment in New York state.
Cornell University police said Saano E. Murembya, 18, was arrested after police were called at about 4:40 p.m. Sunday for a disturbance on campus.
Witnesses told police Murembya was seen naked from the waist down near an on-campus community center and appeared to be “under the influence of some type of drug,” according to a news release posted on the police department’s Facebook page.
Witnesses also told police Murembya accosted at least two women on campus, according to the news release, threw them to the ground and pinned them so they couldn’t escape.

The Cornell Sun adds further details:

A Cornell custodian finishing up his shift and a freshman printing out a computer science worksheet both sprang into action when they saw a half-naked man attacking two women this weekend on North Campus, helping to end a terrifying episode that resulted in criminal charges.
Rogelio Gordon, a 35-year-old custodian in the Robert Purcell Community Center, pulled the man off one woman twice and brought the woman to safety. And when the suspect ran outside and attacked a different freshman woman, witnesses said, Gordon dashed toward the man and knocked him off her, too. That woman later told police she wasn’t able to escape until Gordon intervened. . . .
When the man ran away from Gordon after attacking the second woman, a student stepped in. A freshman who wrestled in high school grabbed the man, put him in a headlock and tried to calm him down until police arrived.
“Obviously he was a threat,” Ian Moritz ’22 said in an interview. “Once I recognized and understood that, I just went for it. He’s clearly a danger to himself and others like that.”
Cornell police on Sunday arrested Saano E. Murembya ’22, of Okemos, Michigan, and charged him with unlawfully imprisoning and attempting to sexually abuse two women. The 18-year-old runner on the cross country and track and field teams has pleaded not guilty to the charges and was released from jail after posting bail. His lawyer has not responded to multiple requests for comment.
Murembya’s girlfriend told police that she saw him take “a tab of what he called acid” — referring to the hallucinogen LSD — hours before the Sunday afternoon incident.
Murembya fled his girlfriend’s dorm around 4 p.m. and entered RPCC, where he grabbed a woman and tried to take off her clothes while yelling that he was going to rape her, police and witnesses said. They said he pinned another woman down outside minutes later, also threatening to rape her — until Gordon stepped in.

Feminists have ignored this “rape culture” story, for some reason.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)

 

 

Category: Crime, Education, Sex Trouble
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