#Marianne2020: Let’s Make This Happen

Posted on | March 20, 2019 | Comments Off on #Marianne2020: Let’s Make This Happen

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 . . .”

Category: Democrats, Election, Shoe Leather Fund, South Carolina

News Media: Our Moral Superiors

Posted on | March 20, 2019 | Comments Off on News Media: Our Moral Superiors

David Sirota is a “journalist” in the same sense that George Stephanopoulos and Chris Matthews are “journalists,” i.e., Democrat political operatives employed by the liberal media. Like all members of the media elite, journalists think of themselves as Our Moral Superiors. They’re better than us, and expect us to be grateful for their tutelage, as they condescend to share their enlightenment with us.

In his role as a columnist for The Guardian, Sirota played the grassroots populist, taking aim at “corporate-friendly Democrats” who “protect the status quo and serve corporate donors,” naming two potential 2020 Democrat presidential candidates — Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker — among these villains. In December, Sirota twice wrote Guardian columns attacking Beto O’Rourke, first for having “frequently voted for Republican legislation” in Congress and then for being the favored candidate of “Washington elites.”

Remember, David Sirota is morally superior to you and me. He cares about the Little People. He’s got journalistic ethics:

Shortly before he gave speeches launching his 2020 campaign earlier this month, Bernie Sanders emailed his supporters, urging them to “do our very best to engage respectfully with our Democratic opponents — talking about the issues we are fighting for, not about personalities or past grievances. I want to be clear that I condemn bullying and harassment of any kind and in any space.”
What he didn’t include was that one of the people already advising him and helping him write those launch speeches is one of his most famously aggressive supporters online.
Since December, David Sirota has, on Twitter, on his own website, and in columns in The Guardian, been trashing most of Sanders’s Democratic opponents — all without disclosing his work with Sanders — and has been pushing back on critics by saying that he was criticizing the other Democrats as a journalist. He centered many of his attacks on Beto O’Rourke, but he also bashed Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Joe Biden, Kirsten Gillibrand, Michael Bennet, John Hickenlooper, Mike Bloomberg, and even Andrew Cuomo.
Sirota’s hiring as a senior adviser and speechwriter was announced by the Sanders campaign on Tuesday morning after The Atlantic contacted the campaign and inquired about the undisclosed role Sirota held while attacking other Democrats.
Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s campaign manager, confirmed in an interview on Tuesday afternoon that Sirota had been in an advisory role prior to his hiring on March 11. “He was advising beforehand,” Shakir said, explaining that Sirota’s informal work for Sanders goes back months.

(Hat-tip: Ace of Spades.) In other words, Sirota has “informally” been a member of the Sanders campaign team since last fall and, while this doesn’t necessarily mean that Sanders was paying Sirota’s bills, it does mean that Sirota’s attacks on O’Rourke and other 2020 Democrat hopefuls were disingenuous and unethical, as his conflict of interest was undisclosed. Notice also that as soon as The Atlantic started asking questions, Sirota was “announced” as a campaign staffer. What this tells you is that Sirota’s services were considered sufficiently valuable to the Sanders campaign that they couldn’t afford to dump him, so they were forced to be honest about his role as a hired attack dog.

They are Our Moral Superiors.

Category: Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Election

In The Mailbox: 03.19.19

Posted on | March 19, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.19.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: The Feast Of St. Joseph
Twitchy: Author Of Several Books On The Electoral College Not A Big Fan Of Mob Rule Or Stolen Elections
Louder With Crowder: Top Five Reasons We Need The Electoral College
Orange County Register: Chinese SF Writers Give Us A Glimpse Into Communist China’s Dystopian Present & Future (h/t The Political Hat)

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Low Trust Societies
American Thinker: How Do We Know What We Know?
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Policy Stunt News
Babalu Blog: Maduro Using Death Squads To Remain In Power, also, Cuba, Venezuela, & Nicaragua – The Caribbean’s New Devil’s Triangle
BattleSwarm: Betopalooza
Da Tech Guy: The Brains Of Your Children On Socialism, also, Mass Shootings – Journalists Are Accessories After The Fact
Don Surber: Google Learns The Power Of Suppress
Dustbury: The Undisputed King
First Street Journal: And Here We Go Again!
The Geller Report: Muslim Arrested In Second Toronto Bioweapon/Bomb Scare In As Many Days, also, President Restarts Effort To Defund Leftist Bastions NEA, NPR, PBS
Hogewash: Suing Twitter, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Hollywood In Toto: Yahoo Bullies Charlie Hunnam For Admiring Jordan Petersen
Joe For America: Did These Two Fox Hosts Conspire To Get Judge Pirro Suspended?
JustOneMinute: Monday Evening
Legal Insurrection: Pentagon Finds $12.8 Billion To Fund The Wall, also, Big SCOTUS Win For Trump On Detention Of Criminal Illegals.
The PanAm Post: FARC Dissident Groups Expand Criminal Empire From Venezuela
Power Line: The Uses Of Socialism, also, Kamala Harris Refused To Investigate Donor Herbalife
Shark Tank: President Trump Writes $100K Check To Homeland Security
Shot In The Dark: An Honest Browbeating
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – Illinois Tax Persiflage
The Political Hat: The Ongoing Assault On The Second Amendment In Nevada
This Ain’t Hell: Vietnam Vet Wins 20-Year Fight Over Displaying Old Glory, also, American Taliban Fighter Scheduled For Release
Victory Girls: Is It Any Wonder Nobody Trusts The Media?
Volokh Conspiracy: MT Criminal Libel Statute Struck Down
Weasel Zippers: Polar Bear Population May Have Quadrupled Despite Al Gore’s Scaremongering, also, Murdoch Family To Launch New Fox, Hires Paul Ryan For Board
Megan McArdle: Mass Murderers Crave Publicity. Maybe Giving Them Less Would Be Helpful.
Mark Steyn: When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, also, Calling Out Around The World

H&R Block Deluxe Edition With Refund Bonus
Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

The $100 Trillion Woman

Posted on | March 19, 2019 | Comments Off on The $100 Trillion Woman

Elizabeth Warren wants to spend, spend, spend:

Sen. Warren believes she knows the way into Americans’ hearts: Lots of government spending.
In her CNN townhall Monday night, Sen. Warren responded to almost every question with a proposed new government program.
Over the course of the 80 minute forum, Sen. Warren endorsed Medicare-for-All, slavery reparations, universal childcare, universal pre-K, “universal pre-pre-K,” the creation of 3 million new federal housing units, increasing infrastructure spending several times, forgiveness of student loan debt, and the Green New Deal.
Add it all up, and it’s more than $100 trillion.
Estimates range on Warren’s proposed spending plans, but the Green New Deal has alone been projected to cost at least $93 trillion; slavery reparations have previously been pegged at upward of $14 trillion; and Warren says her universal child care, universal pre-K, and universal pre-pre-K programs can be done for $3 trillion.

That bitch is crazy.

Category: Election, Elizabeth Warren

Reading Samizdat

Posted on | March 19, 2019 | Comments Off on Reading Samizdat

This morning, I answered an email from a reader disappointed that I had linked the pickup artist (PUA) site Chateau Heartiste in my post about feminist Sophie Vershbow. The content of the post at Chateau Heartiste is anti-Semitic, and the comments on the post are even worse, and I replied to the reader’s email explaining that of course I do not endorse such sentiments. That post was linked on a “credit-where-credit-is-due” basis, because that’s where I’d learned of Ms. Vershbow’s existence, after searching for a certain PUA slang term. As I explained in my email: “The thing about Internet discourse is, if you don’t ban anti-Semitism in any particular forum, you’ll find the anti-Semites take over and hound everybody else out. We have never tolerated it in our comments, and I’m sorry that you were offended by the Chateau Heartiste link, but I also occasionally link CNN and the NY Times, you know.”

A link is not an endorsement, nor is a quote an endorsement. I’ve linked and quoted dozens of feminists here in the course of criticizing feminism; you cannot criticize ideas second-hand, but must wrangle with them directly, and I trust that my readers are sufficiently intelligent to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. As I said, anti-Semitism is banned in the comments here because the alternative is to have every post hijacked by anti-Semites, but this rule doesn’t prevent me (or anyone else) from reading outside the limits of permitted discourse.

Here’s an example of why that matters: Professor Kevin MacDonald has been accused of anti-Semitism, and is considered untouchable by mainstream journalists. Yesterday, however, Professor MacDonald published “The Role of Empathy in Moral Communities: Altruism and Pathological Altruism,” which is worth reading. What caught my attention in this was a quote from a 2015 article by British liberal journalist David Goodhart:

There has been a huge gap between our ruling elite’s views and those of ordinary people on the street. This was brought home to me when dining at an Oxford college and the eminent person next to me, a very senior civil servant, said: ‘When I was at the Treasury, I argued for the most open door possible to immigration [because] I saw it as my job to maximise global welfare not national welfare.’ I was even more surprised when the notion was endorsed by another guest, one of the most powerful television executives in the country. He, too, felt global welfare was paramount and that he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham. … [The political class] failed to control the inflow more overtly in the interests of existing citizens.

What this quote by Goodhart shows is that the intellectual elite in England (and in America, too) have adopted a cosmopolitan worldview — citoyens du monde — that leads them to deny any patriotic obligation to their own country and their own people, instead devoting themselves to “global welfare,” i.e., advancing the interests of foreigners. This attitude, Professor MacDonald argues, is symptomatic of pathological altruism.

Why is it that, to find such arguments, one must read beyond the range of what is considered acceptable mainstream discourse? Isn’t it because Cultural Marxism has advanced so far that the only people able to think freely are Thought Criminals? While I don’t want to get tangled up in the arguments about Professor MacDonald’s alleged anti-Semitism, I’m willing to read forbidden authors — like dissidents in the Soviet Union reading samizdat — if they write something that will help me understand our current political predicament. It should be obvious that we cannot solve our problems if we allow the Thought Police to decide for us what we are allowed to read or if, adopting the guilt-by-association tactics of the SPLC, we make it impossible for people to think freely, because so many people have been labeled proponents of “hate.”

The Third Reich built the autobahn and the Volkswagen; does that make you a neo-Nazi when you drive your VW on the freeway?

UPDATE: Dear God . . .

We have to recognize the threat of white nationalism. We’ve got to call it out. As President of the United States, my Justice Department would go after white nationalists with full prosecution. #WarrenTownHall

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) March 19, 2019

Criminalizing opinions?

Category: Intellectuals

Totalitarian Twitter Tactics

Posted on | March 19, 2019 | Comments Off on Totalitarian Twitter Tactics

Rep. Devin Nunes has filed a $250 million lawsuit against Twitter, and it’s time to have a conversation about the silencing of dissent:

Does anyone remember “GamerGate”? In October 2014, a friend named Beth Haper urged me to pay more attention to the controversy that erupted over accusations of unethical favoritism by journalists covering the videogame industry. “Stacy, you need to talk to Adam Baldwin about this,” Beth told me, and I immediately called the actor, whom I’d met a few years earlier in California while visiting his friend Andrew Breitbart. Over the phone, Baldwin explained that “GamerGate” had awakened videogame enthusiasts to the menace that feminists and other “social justice warriors” (SJWs) posed to their pastime. Because I was then working on a book about radical feminism, this was of interest to me and I began paying closer attention to “GamerGate” with the eventual result that in February 2016 my popular @rsmccain account was banned from Twitter. Although no one at Twitter would ever explain exactly why I was banned (a company spokesman told Debra Saunders that “privacy” concerns prevented such an explanation), many observers noted that I was banned shortly after feminist ideologue Anita Sarkeesian, a key figure in the “GameGate” controversy, was announced as a member of Twitter’s “Trust & Safety Council.”
No less an authority than feminist author Amanda Marcotte has claimed that understanding “GamerGate” is crucial to explaining how Donald Trump was elected president and, while my views are diametrically opposed to Marcotte’s, I cannot deny the possibility she is correct about this, although perhaps not in the way she intends. What happened in “GamerGate,” from my perspective, is that the Left exploited the political prejudices of liberal journalists in order to redefine disagreement as “hate,” and to prohibit criticism as “harassment.” In the three years since I was banned from Twitter, the use of these tactics to silence conservative voices online — to “de-platform” and “de-monetize” the Left’s opponents — has escalated to the point that some have suggested anti-trust regulation be invoked against companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google. Beyond the First Amendment issues concerning online free speech, however, the Left’s increasingly common tactic of smearing their enemies with the “hate” label has important ramifications for every sphere of public-policy debate. . . .

You can read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.

Category: Media Bias

Robert Francis ‘Beto’ O’Rourke

Posted on | March 18, 2019 | Comments Off on Robert Francis ‘Beto’ O’Rourke

Shane Ryan is the kind of Democrat who feels that Barack Obama was insufficiently progressive, and he won’t get fooled again:

What, exactly, is Beto O’Rourke’s appeal?
It’s not policy-oriented, and it’s not identity-based. He’s independently rich, and despite his grab at exoticism by transforming “Robert” into “Beto,” he’s white. As the Vanity Fair piece noted, he won his first House race by “drawing a large number of white Republican voters to his cause, which deepened suspicion from left-leaning Chicano activists.” Representing a safe Democratic district, he nevertheless voted with Republicans 167 times in six years. . . .
Let’s state it plainly: If you like Beto O’Rourke, you like him because he seems cool, and you think the fact that he seems cool means he’s going to bring everyone together under the banner of good feelings and become the next Obama. . . .
His appeal is the appeal of the surface, of the pathetic yearning to feel good without fixing anything.

(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

O’Rourke raised more than $6 million right out of the gate and he’s in the top five in recent polls, which means that he’s likely to be in the race a while. Between O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, that means three of the leading candidates for the Democrat nomination are white males. So the identity-politics crowd, who insist that white males are the root of all evil, are increasingly unlikely to be excited by the result.

“Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen . . .”