In The Mailbox: 03.07.18

Posted on | March 7, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.07.18

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: How Long Till You Notice?
Twitchy: Dana Loesch Truth-Nukes Anti-Gun Actress Marina Sirtis, Who Isn’t Following Her Own Advice
Louder With Crowder: Male Privilege Is A Myth – Change My Mind (Second Season)
USA Today: How Buffett, Bezos, & Dimon Can Change Our Too Much Health Care Crisis (h/t NeoWayland)

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Harvard – Do As We Say, Not As We Do
American Thinker: Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf Should Be Prosecuted
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
BattleSwarm: 2018 Texas Primary Results
Bring The HEAT: Neptunus Lex – Six Years On
CDR Salamander: History May Not Be Bending The Way You Want It To
Da Tech Guy: A Sensible Partitioning Of California, also, China Under Xi – Trigger Warnings Backed BY Real Triggers
Don Surber: Trump Will End California’s Exploitation Of Mexicans
Dustbury: Where Do They Go From Here?
The Geller Report: GOP Calls For Resignations Of Seven House Democrats With Ties To Anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, also, Utah Muslim Attempts To Detonate Bomb At School
Hogewash: Second Star To The Right, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Joe For America: Department Of Justice Sues California Over Illegals
JustOneMinute: As The World Turns
Legal Insurrection: No Blue Wave In Texas Primaries; Media Shocked To Find Texas Isn’t Just Their Austin Friends, also, Brendan Tevlin’s Jihadi Killer Pleads Guilty
Michelle Malkin: Give VA Secretary Shulkin The Boot
Power Line: How Russia Tried To Block US Energy Production, also, Why Won’t Georgia Protect Christian Speech On Campus?
Shark Tank: Another Democrat Looks To Replace Ros-Lehtinen
Shot In The Dark: Lie First, Lie Always – Why Is Erin Maye Quade Lying?
STUMP: More On Divestment – Your Money? Go For It. Other Peoples’ Money? Not So Fast
The Jawa Report: Meanwhile At Pine View High School
The Political Hat: The Woke White-Free Future Of The BBC
This Ain’t Hell: Two More Plead Guilty In “Fat Leonard” Case, also, “Gunsplaining” To Adam Weinstein
Victory Girls: Political Pundits & Pundits Miss The Mark – Again
Weasel Zippers: NC Monument Singled Out For Vandalism At South Mountain Battlefield, also, Eleven Europeans Caught Trying To Sneak Into The US From Canada
Mark Steyn: And Then There Were Nunberg…, also, Inclusion Riders Of The Showbiz Apocalypse

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History, Race and ‘Science’

Posted on | March 6, 2018 | 3 Comments

Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.
— Hillaire Belloc, 1898

A few days ago, I stumbled across a feminist Tumblr blog called “Fierce Fat Feminist” (“Intersectional Transnational Feminist — Fat Black Babe — Queer”) which offered this startling assertion:

“Race was invented by white people to prove that
white people were superior to all People of Color
to justify murdering them, raping them, and stealing
all their land and resources. That’s why People of Color
can’t be racist towards white people. You can’t
take part in a system that exists solely to oppress you
and people like you, but people who
benefit from that system can and do.”

Challenged on this, “Fierce Fat Feminist” proved the truth of Vox Day’s maxim “SJWs Always Double Down” by adding a series of quotes (apparently cribbed from the “Scientific racism” article on Wikipedia) implying that the concept of race was invented in the 18th century for such purposes (i.e., “to justify murdering . . . People of Color”).

This is a false history, a species of anti-white propaganda intended to incite racial animosity by inflaming a sense of historical grievance. The economist Thomas Sowell addressed such arguments in his 1999 book The Quest for Cosmic Justice which, among other things, addresses the myth of transtemporal injustice. This is the idea that a group of people living in the present day (Victims) are entitled to retribution against other present-day groups of people (Oppressors) whose ancestors may have committed injustices against the ancestors of the Victims.

Sowell so effectively demolished that idea that I need only recommend his book to anyone who might be laboring under such a delusion, but I think it is important to show how historical ignorance is exploited in the service of these misbegotten notions of “social justice.”

Start with this: Time moves in only one direction. No one can go back and change the past, and every person alive is born with a historical inheritance that is beyond his control. It doesn’t matter what your race may be, what the economic condition of your parents or grandparents, whatever wars or plagues or natural catastrophes befell your remote ancestors. Everyone is born with certain advantages or disadvantages, and we have to make the best of our situation in a world where we are powerless to change anything that happened yesterday, much less what happened a hundred years before we were born.

Just to cite one obvious personal example, I was born in 1959, the same year that Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba. When I was 4 years old, one of Castro’s admirers named Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy, forever changing American history.

So many evils of our world today began that fatal November afternoon in Dallas that we can scarcely begin to imagine what America would be like had it not been for JFK’s assassination. As I say, Oswald was inspired by Castro, and also by Soviet Communism, which in turn can be traced directly backward to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a consequence of the First World War, which began when a Serbian nationalist assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In a sense, then, I was born into a world full of evil that can be blamed directly on a handful of madmen — damn you, Gavrilo Prinzip! — and I might be justified in an eternal hatred of Serbs, or Russians, or Cubans. However, nothing would be gained by basing my worldview on such ancient grudges, and it is pathetically foolish for people to allow themselves to be consumed by impotent rage over past wrongs. Making historical grudges the basis of public policy is a surefire formula for civil war, as demonstrated by the history of the Balkans, the Middle East and other such cases where perpetual animosity results from a sense of inherited grievances.

The Fallacy of Collective Guilt

“Fierce Fat Feminist” would have us believe that history (“Race was invented by white people,” etc.) defines a “system” which means that “People of Color can’t be racist towards white people.” In other words, hating white people in 2018 is justified because white people in the past allegedly did all that “murdering . . . raping . . . and stealing.”

Implied in that assertion is that (a) white people were uniquely guilty of such wrongs, (b) “People of Color” have never historically committed any similar wrongs, and (c) the uniquely evil past of white people means that they deserve to be hated. The logical flaws of such claims are so obvious that I won’t insult my readers’ intelligence by refuting “Fierce Fat Feminist” point-by-point. Suffice it to say that collective guilt is a fallacy.

How am I to blame for, e.g., Pizarro’s conquest of Peru? Certainly my own obscure 16th-century British ancestors were not consulted by the Spanish in matters of colonial policy in Peru, nor were my more recent ancestors consulted in regard to U.S. policy toward the Lakota Sioux. You want to blame me for General Custer? That would be a shock to my Alabama and Texas ancestors, who spent four years fighting Custer and the whole damned U.S. Army. Not that I wish to rekindle that old dispute, you see, but the collective category “white people” includes an awful lot of people who aren’t me, or remotely related to me, and I resent being hated for things those other white people did.

Every man is accountable to God for his own sins, and certainly no Christian can justify hating someone because of that person’s ancestry. Nothing could be more foolish. My Scottish ancestors and my English ancestors were mortal enemies, once upon a time, and because I married a Yankee — my wife is from Ohio — my own children have an inheritance from both sides of the bloodiest war in American history. My oldest daughter’s husband is of Argentine ancestry, and I sometimes annoy him by loudly singing “Rule Britannia” to tease him about Argentina’s defeat in the Falklands War, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mind the joke.

Well, what about “scientific racism”? What about “Fierce Fat Feminist” and her claim that white people “invented” the concept of race merely to justify their own sense of superiority? One of the interesting things about science is that one must be literate to produce science or to consume it. That is to say, science has no proper meaning except to those who can read and write and, until Gutenberg invented the printing press circa 1450, science was restricted to a comparative handful of the cultural elite who had access to manuscripts. It was the revolution wrought by Gutenberg’s invention that permitted mass production of literature — including scientific literature — and even then, it must be remembered, the printed word was only influential among those whose education enabled them to read. As recently as the 19th century, public education was not universally available in Europe or America, most people were quite poor by modern standards, and whatever science had to say about racial differences circa 1800 (or even 1900), this did not reflect the beliefs or knowledge of anyone except the scientists themselves.

How foolish, then, to blame “white people” collectively for whatever views of race were circulated as science among the educated elite of the 19th or 18th centuries? Let the curious reader purchase a copy of Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color — a very influential book in the 1920s, written by a Harvard Ph.D. — and see what sort of insulting assertions he makes about white people who are not of “Nordic” ancestry. Italians, Spaniards and Greeks are disparagingly lumped into the “Mediterranean” category and, as for the Jews — oh, let’s not even start about what a Harvard man had to say about Jews circa 1920.

Scientific progress is a wonderful thing to study, if you have both the ability and the time to do it, and I think the 21st-century scholar could benefit from reading Stoddard’s work just to see which of his claims of “science” have been discredited. On the other hand, I hesitate to recommend this topic, for fear that some readers might conclude that Stoddard wasn’t entirely wrong about everything. But I digress . . .

We should be cautious when making categorical statements about large groups that include millions of human individuals, the way “Fierce Fat Feminist” has done by assigning to “white people” a collective guilt for “murdering . . . raping . . . and stealing.”

This is an insult, and insults lead to resentment. Does anyone suppose that “white people,” as a collective group, will forever be content to shrug off this kind of insulting racial guilt-trip? Any sober student of history must conclude that “Fierce Fat Feminist” is a fool to imagine she can haphazardly hurl such provocative anti-white insults onto the Internet without consequence. Even if you know nothing of history, however, why do you think Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton? And why do you think liberals were so surprised by Hillary’s defeat?

We could hypothesize that a major contributing factor in Trump’s victory was that a lot of white people in 2016 were fed up with the kind of “intersectional” nonsense emerging from the Left. The campus rape hysteria, the Black Lives Matter movement, university student protests — every time you turned on the news there was an idiotic mob screaming for “social justice” because they’d been “triggered” or whatever.

“America Was NEVER Great” — I remember standing in the middle of that protest in Cleveland during the 2016 Republican convention and noticing that there were maybe 300 protesters, 400 reporters there to cover the protest, and 800 cops to maintain order. Nobody was harassed or assaulted, nobody’s civil rights were violated. Academic celebrity Cornell West showed up and gave a speech, then everybody paraded down the streets to protest against the alleged “racism” of police. But as I say, there were hundreds of armed police on the scene, none of whom engaged in any police brutality, despite the provocation of a Communist mob waving anti-police signs and chanting anti-police slogans:

“There will be no peace unless there is justice,” Professor Cornell West said Tuesday in a speech to an anti-police rally here organized by the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). Speaking through a megaphone amid a crowd of protesters gathered at Public Square in downtown Cleveland, West invoked “the legacy of white supremacy in this country that goes back 400 years” to condemn police.
West spoke in front of a giant RCP banner declaring, “Time to Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution. STOP MURDER BY POLICE.” Activists with the RCP held aloft signs that read, “America Was NEVER Great! We Need to OVERTHROW This System!”

If I could see the absurdity of such protests, as a reporter on the scene, wasn’t the absurdity apparent to everyone else? Imagine a middle-class Ohio voter, coming home from his job, switching on the TV news and seeing coverage of that protest. “Those people are crazy,” says the Ohio voter, cracking open a cold beer, as he decides to vote for Trump.

Liberals never saw this coming, because liberals live inside an echo chamber where everybody watches MSNBC and shares their certainty that (a) “racism” is the worst thing in the world, and (b) the Republican Party is the political vehicle of “racism” in America. It never occurs to the liberal to question either (a) or (b), because if anyone ever begins to doubt these ideas, it won’t take too much scrutiny for them to discover how absurd these beliefs are, and they won’t be a liberal anymore.

A few weeks ago, I told a friend that there are two books every conservative should read if they want to understand how liberals think: Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951) and Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (1995). The herd mentality of the indignant mob — e.g., the “intersectional” queer feminist on Tumblr — cannot be understood as a rational response to objective reality. Rather, liberalism can only be understood as a psychological and emotional phenomenon. People living in a prosperous society with a freely elected government don’t join a Communist protest march (or spend their time ranting about racism on Tumblr) because they are “oppressed,” in any objective sense of that word. Instead, it is their subjective emotions — and their ignorance of objective reality — which explains why they succumb to the mob mentality.

One of the chief causes of this derangement is the failure of our education system to teach history. Properly taught, history requires students to step outside their own subjective feelings — what are my feelings about Serbian nationalism? — and view events objectively. It is extraordinarily difficult for me to be objective about the Battle of Gettysburg, when I know that my great-grandfather was captured there just east of Willoughby Run and spent the next two years as a prisoner of war in Fort Delaware. Yet because the study of history requires me to consider this in comparison to other events (e.g., the Battle of the Somme, where the British Fourth Army suffered more than 50,000 casualties on the first day of a battle that lasted more than four months), I am less likely to feel any especial hurt over my ancestor’s misfortune. Alas, the teaching of history has been hijacked by “social justice” ideologues who seek to advance a left-wing political agenda by indoctrinating young people with a sense of permanent rage about the “oppression” attributed to racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, imperialism, etc.

What the politicization of history has produced is a generation of allegedly “educated” young people with a shockingly shallow knowledge of actual history, but with very deep feelings about “injustice.” Handed diplomas that certify them as being “educated,” these ignorant young fools may then spend the rest of their lives searching around for “evidence” of the injustices that they have been taught to believe are everywhere in “a system that exists solely to oppress you.”

Victims of ‘Cisheteronormative Patriarchy’

Nothing could be more absurd than students at elite universities imagining themselves waging war against “oppression.” Yet in 2016, progressives at the University of Southern California (where the cost of attendance is $69,144 a year, including room and board) mounted an effort to impeach a conservative member of the student government who was accused, among other things, of “undermining the work . . . of our Women’s Student Assembly.” Upon investigation, I discovered that the executive director of the USC Women’s Student Assembly, Vanessa Diaz, called for the “dismantling of our capitalist imperialist white supremacist cisheteronormative patriarchy.”

Is anyone still surprised that Donald Trump got elected? What could be more perfectly calculated to piss off a working-class voter in Wisconsin than the spectacle of a girl at a $70,000-a-year elite private university claiming to be a victim of “cisheteronormative patriarchy”?

We live in a world where actual science has produced the marvelous technology that not enables “Fierce Fat Feminist” to rant endlessly on Tumblr about racism, but also allows white voters in Wisconsin to read about dimwit college students protesting in Southern California. And in the months leading up to the 2016 election, it seemed dimwit college students everywhere were protesting against some sort of oppression. For example, at elite Oberlin College ($68,672 a year, including room and board), students in December 2015 were angry that there were too many white musicians in the jazz band. They demanded “a 4% annual increase in the enrollment of Black students in the Jazz Department starting in 2016 to accumulate to 40% increase by the year 2022.”

How many votes for Donald Trump do you think were produced by that kind of “social justice” protest? Because, as I say, this left-wing protest mob mentality seemed to be everywhere in the months leading up to the 2016 election. Surely, I wasn’t the only one who noticed it, nor do I think I was alone in suspecting that these protests were ginned up by activists trying to mobilize young people to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Liberals never expected that this kind of activism could backfire, which is one reason they were so surprised on Election Night 2016. Perhaps if they had studied history more carefully, they might have anticipated a negative reaction to the insulting accusations of racism and sexism that were the rhetorical output of these left-wing protest mobs.

Studying history, you learn a lot about human nature, including the fact that people get angry when they are unfairly accused of wrongdoing — “murdering . . . raping . . . and stealing” — so that this kind of collective scapegoating inevitably produces a backlash. Think about that Trump voter in Wisconsin or Ohio, the white guy who gets up every morning and goes to work to pay the bills, just trying to give his kids a better life. Does that guy want to listen to “Fierce Fat Feminist” lecture him about his collective racial guilt? Probably not, but he damned sure doesn’t want to be lectured by Mika Brzezinski (Williams College, Class of ’89) about why he’s a “sexist” because he didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton (Wellesley College, Class of ’69, Yale Law, Class of ’73). All these rich people with their elite college degrees keep telling that white working-class guy that he is what’s wrong with America, and on Nov. 8, 2016, he voted for Donald Trump as a gesture of his contempt for the liberal elite.

Every time I call attention to idiot Tumblrinas like “Fierce Fat Feminist,” they respond by claiming that I’m engaged in “harassment,” trying to “intimidate” or “silence” them, but nothing could be further from the truth. As a conservative, nothing better suits my purposes than for these idiots to have a platform to spew the toxic contents of their warped minds, so everyone can see what liberal “education” has produced.

Maybe I’m not an expert in “science,” but I’ve studied enough history to learn a few things about human nature, and my hunch is that the election of Donald Trump was not a one-time fluke. The ordinary American’s resentment of our nation’s decadent elite has been building up for many years, and the elite have been desperately trying to suppress the political force of this resentment, which Trump so adroitly harnessed in 2016. The elite keep trying to distract Americans with media sideshows and carnival barkers like Jimmy Kimmel, but their propaganda project is failing. This year’s Oscars had the worst ratings ever, and CNN doesn’t have a single show in the Top 20 of cable-news ratings. Our decadent elite have sown the wind, and they are beginning to reap the whirlwind.

When white people are constantly lectured about their racism, many of them will respond exactly as the lecturers intend, by internalizing a sense of collective guilt. However, some people will predictably react against these lectures and their response will be, “F–k yeah, racism!”

That kind of backlash is the real danger of the “social justice” mentality, which celebrates victimhood as a heroic achievement. This is why you see highly privileged young people at elite universities absurdly claiming to be oppressed by “cisheteronormative patriarchy.” Yet there is a sort of Newtonian principle in politics, so that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, and the opposite reaction — the backlash against “social justice” ideology — is likely to be quite ferocious, when the elite lack any kind of sympathy and understanding toward the people being demonized by this collective racial guilt-trip.

What does Mika Brzezinski know about the plight of a steelworker in Youngstown or a forklift drive in Kenosha? Nothing at all, and yet she and the rest of her snobby elitist media clique never hesitate to derogate the white working-class voter who rejects their liberal worldview.

It doesn’t really matter much what science says about race, because scientists constantly disagree with each other and today’s latest research will be contradicted by a new study published tomorrow. Cautious skepticism toward claims of “science” is really the most scientific viewpoint of all, but fools are not generally cautious or skeptical.

The fool is more likely to become The True Believer, a fanatical devotee of one of those “mass movements” that concerned Eric Hoffer. There is no shortage of fools in the world, or otherwise CNN and MSNBC would have even smaller audiences than they already do. There are all kinds of fools — Democrat fools, Republican fools, “intersectional” queer feminist fools — and in politics, the competing mobs of fools usually manage to cancel each other out, producing a Hegelian synthesis of folly, so to speak.

From time to time, however, this balance can shift quite suddenly, producing cataclysmic upheavals. History teaches that anarchy, civil strife and war can erupt unexpectedly in the most prosperous societies. The Peloponnesian War, our own Civil War, the First World War — the pages of history are cluttered with such examples, just as we can read of once-mighty empires that collapsed as a result of cultural decadence.

How many students today have read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? In my home library, there’s a big three-volume set of that classic history, which I’ve read through twice, but which I’m reasonably sure none of my children have ever bothered reading. If my kids haven’t read Gibbon, I doubt very much their peers have bothered with it, and so know nothing of this lesson, how the Romans fell victim to decadence until finally their empire was overrun by barbarians.

Our ancestors, who bequeathed to Americans this constitutional republic, securing to us “the blessings of liberty” after winning our independence in a war against the British Empire, were well aware of the lessons of history. It is now fashionable in academia to scorn the Founders as a bunch of racists, but this is the kind of nonsense we expect from our intellectual elite. What could be more decadent than a Ph.D. being paid a six-figure salary to teach the children of the rich (whose parents are paying $70,000 a year for this “education”) to hate their own country as “a system that exists solely to oppress . . . People of Color”?

Well, you “can’t be racist towards white people,” according to the “Fierce Fat Feminist,” but you can insult people by falsely accusing them of “racism,” and history teaches us that this kind of rhetoric — demonizing scapegoats for the sake of politics — never leads to good results.

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.

Category: Racism

In The Mailbox: 03.06.18

Posted on | March 6, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.06.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: National Oreo Day
Twitchy: @Wendy’s Wins The Internet Again
Louder With Crowder: Dick’s, Walmart Sued For Refusing To Sell Gun To 20-Year-Old
Breitbart: Hollywood Celebs Push Gun Control At Oscars, Surrounded By Wall of Armed Officers

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Seismic Italian Election
American Power: Academy Awards Ratings Collapse
American Thinker: The Broward County Superintendent’s Corrupt And Dangerous Agenda
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Ethanol Subsidy News
BattleSwarm: Texas Primary Election Today! Go Vote!
BLACKFIVE: Jack Carr, The Terminal List
Bring The HEAT: The Yom Kippur War And The Development Of Military Doctrine
CDR Salamander: Even The New York Times Can’t Ignore Europe’s Suicide
Da Tech Guy: A Reminder To Dreamers As Your Amnesty Runs Out, also, Are We Being Googled?
Don Surber: Trump Left Democrats Holding The Bag On DACA
Dustbury: Subluminal, If Not Subliminal
Fausta: The Venezuelan Refugee Crisis Is The Regime’s Expansionist Weapon
The Geller Report: “This Is How You’ll End” If You “Irritate Your Husband”
Hogewash: An Irregular Dwarf, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Joe For America: Houston Texans Say No To Disrespectful Kneelers
JustOneMinute: On To The House!
Legal Insurrection: How PragerU Is Winning The Culture War Five Minutes At A Time, also, Twenty States Sue Feds, Trying To Pull The Plug On Obamacare
Power Line: The Clintons’ Tentacles Are Everywhere, also, Failure To Incarcerate, Minnesota Edition
Shark Tank: Scott, Corcoran Praise Measure Protecting Floridians From Future Tax Hikes
Shot In The Dark: I Don’t Want To Go Home
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – Update Your Withholding, Shot Across The Bow, And “Clever” Ideas Progressing
This Ain’t Hell: Lady Lex Found, also, Illinois Gun Show Bans AR-15 Rifles
Victory Girls: Dear America, The Ayatollah Khamenei Would Like You To Hand In All Your Guns
Weasel Zippers: CNN Goes To Thailand To Interview Whore Claiming To Have Dirt On Trump, also, Illegal Aliens Arrested After Shutting Down Street Outside Paul Ryan’s Wisconsin Office
Megan McArdle: Publicly Slighting Millions Of NRA Members Isn’t Good For Business – Or America
Mark Steyn: Curvy Morns And Tucker Nights, also, The Silent Star

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In The Mailbox: 03.05.18

Posted on | March 6, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.05.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Thad Cochran (R-MS) To Resign From Senate
Twitchy: Jim Acosta Attempts To Throw Sarah Huckabee Sanders Under The Bus But Gets Lit Up Instead
Louder With Crowder: #BoycottNRA’s Epic Fail – NRA Membership Surges
NYSlime: China Presses Its Internet Censorship Efforts Across The Globe (h/t NeoWayland)

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Never Apologizing Can Make You A Success
American Power: How Progressives Win The Culture War, also, Europe Struggles With The Rise Of Populist Nationalism
American Thinker: Obama Pressures Facebook To Censor News, And Zuckerberg Complies
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
BattleSwarm: Bangladeshi SF Writer Zafar Iqbal Stabbed In The Head As “An Enemy Of Islam”
BLACKFIVE: Alison Gaylin, If I Die Tonight
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday, also, An Eye On The Fleet On Midrats
Da Tech Guy: In Illinois, The Democratic Party Is Michael Madigan, And Michael Madigan Is The Democratic Party, also, Germany – One Videogame Hitler/Nazi Away From Der 4th Reich?
Don Surber: “Nobody Does Self-Deprecating Humor Better Than I Do”, also, Politics As A Fashion Accessory
Dustbury: Strange Search Engine Queries, also, Axe Me No Questions
Fausta: Mexican Police Confess To Handing Three Italian Men Over To The CJNG
Fred On Everything: The Future Of The Jews – More Of The Past?
The Geller Report: Pakistani Imam – “We Will Come Out As A Force to Establish Global Islamic Rule”, also, Italy’s Voters Choose Populists In Stinging Rebuke To EU
Hogewash: Yours Truly, Johnny Atsign, also, Team Kimberlin Post Of The Day
Joe For America: Italian Politician Wins Big After Promising To Deport 500K Migrants, also, Kim Dotcom Proposes Twitter Alternative If Censorship Continues
JustOneMinute: Gun Violence Restraining Order Bill Advances Through Florida Senate
Legal Insurrection: Shocking No-One Outside Of Hollywood, Oscars Ratings Hit All-Time Low, also, Lewis & Clark Law School Students Shout Down, Disrupt Christina Hoff Sommers
Michelle Malkin: Missing Marizela – Seven Years
Power Line: Night Thoughts With Nunes, also, NYT Reports Sweden Crime Problem They Criticized Trump For Discussing
Shark Tank: Bilirakis, Curbelo Join Forces For Medicare
Shot In The Dark: Lie First, Lie Always – Lori Sturdevant, Bloomberg’s Parrot
STUMP: Memory Monday – Current Reflections On The Spanish Flu & The First Week of March 1918
The Political Hat: The Right Of Every Free Adult
This Ain’t Hell: Retired Marine Colonel Faces Child Abuse Charges, also, PAC Says NRA Is Terrorist Organization
Victory Girls: Parkland Kids – Past Stupid & Arrogant, Straight To Rutabaga, also, #MeToo Means Nothing To Hollywood
Weasel Zippers: Former Crack-Smoking Mayor Of DC Gets Statue, also, Wisconsin Sheriff Calls For Parenting, End Of Participation Trophies To End School Violence
Mark Steyn: Prada Islam And Ramadan Socks, also, Montage Of Mondays

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The Left Is Attacking Free Speech — and Helping ISIS Target Its Enemies

Posted on | March 5, 2018 | Comments Off on The Left Is Attacking Free Speech — and Helping ISIS Target Its Enemies

Last week brought further attacks on free speech from the Left. Daily Beast reporter Taylor Lorenz doxxed the daughters of Pamela Geller. If you know Geller — and I’ve been her friend since 2007 — you know that it is a dishonest smear to call her “Muslim-hating.” She is a ferocious opponent of radical Islam, but she is also a defender of those innocent Muslims who are victims of radical Islam. This distinction doesn’t matter to leftist idiots like Taylor Lorenz, of course. Anyone who is identified as “right-wing” is considered fair game by the radical Left. Facts don’t matter, and neither does simple human decency:

The children of conservative commentator Pamela Geller have been harassed and their social media talk show has been canceled after the Daily Beast revealed Geller was their mother.
In her article titled, “The Instagram Stars Hiding Their Famous, Muslim-Hating Mom, Pamela Geller,” the Daily Beast’s Taylor Lorenz doxed the women as Pamela Geller’s daughters. They had not disclosed the family link, perhaps due to the recurring death threats from Muslim extremists that Geller receives.
Following the release of Lorenz’s article, which was heavily criticized on social media, Geller’s four children immediately began to receive harassment and violent messages.
Comments included: “Racist piece of shit!,” “Fuck you, racist,” “Racist bitch,” and “Swine,” the majority of which was sent to Geller’s most famous daughter, Claudia, who runs the popular Instagram account “girlwithnojob” which has 2.8 million followers.

Think about this for a minute: Claudia Oshry spent years building a massive online audience with a non-political message, entirely separate from and unrelated to her mother’s popular conservative blog. Yet the tie of kinship was used as an excuse to attack Claudia and her siblings, because of their mother’s alleged “Islamophobia.” My own children, incidentally, have at times been harassed by my various left-wing enemies. My general attitude toward evil trolls is “never let them see you sweat” — these monsters take sadistic pleasure in thinking they’ve inflicted suffering on their targets — but a few years ago, the FBI arrested one of my harassers who was sent to federal prison as a result.

Pamela Geller’s enemies are even more vicious:

A Massachusetts man was convicted [in October 2017] of plotting to behead conservative blogger Pamela Geller and kill other Americans on behalf of the Islamic State group.
Jurors found David Wright guilty of all charges, including conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization and conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries. . . .
Prosecutors said Wright, his uncle and a third man conspired to kill Geller because they were upset she organized Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest in Texas in 2015. During the contest, two other men opened fire outside and wounded a security guard before they were killed in a shootout with law enforcement assigned to guard the event.
Wright’s uncle, Ussamah Rahim, told Wright on a recorded phone call later that month that he couldn’t wait to attack Geller and decided instead to go after “those boys in blue,” referring to police. Wright told his uncle that was “beautiful” and encouraged him to delete all the data from his computer before carrying out his attack.
Hours later, Rahim was shot and killed by authorities after he lunged at them with a knife when they approached him in Boston. The attack on Geller, who has spearheaded scores of events across the nation to decry Islamic extremism, was never carried out.

If you know that ISIS wants Geller dead, is it so difficult to understand why Geller’s daughters deserve to have their privacy respected? The only purpose served by Taylor Lorenz’s disgusting “journalism” was harassment — to punish and attempt to silence Geller by attacking her daughters. Caroline Glick explains this succinctly:

The mainstream media are either stupid or evil — or both.
That is the only reasonable conclusion you can reach from the Daily Beast’s article [Feb. 28] that exposed the identities of Pamela Geller’s four daughters and the subsequent decision of major and minor newspapers and magazines throughout the Western world to re-run the story. . . .
It is possible that the Daily Beast, the Washington Post, the New York Post, Cosmopolitan magazine, and all the rest have no idea that there is a direct link between the fatwa — or Islamic ruling — published by the Islamic State on May 5, 2015 calling for Geller to be “slaughtered,” and ISIS’s attempt the next month to behead her. . . .
For more than a decade, the media and leftist shock troops, operating in lock step with Islamist groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), have tried to destroy Geller. . . .

You should read the whole thing, which recounts the history of the media’s complicity in the whitewashing of radical Islam. It is astonishing that Geller — a Jew targeted for death by an Islamic fatwa! — is being smeared as a proponent of “hate” by liberal journalists.

Thank you, @PamelaGeller, for reporting the kind of news cowardly liberals like Taylor Lorenz want Americans to ignore. https://t.co/ZIbRmUsZUv pic.twitter.com/pTPRY431Tt

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) March 5, 2018

What bothers me about incidents like this is how liberals, because of their mindless loyalty to the Democrat Party, are willing to attack anyone who disrupts the propaganda narrative dictated by the Democrats’ narrow partisan interests. There was a time — and I’m old enough to remember it — when Democrats defended Israel against her enemies, but that has changed in the past 30 years. Democrats have increasingly pandered to constituencies (including our decadent academic elite) who are perversely sympathetic to the radical Muslims who are determine to see Israel wiped off the map. Liberals have turned against Israel because, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Republicans were identified as pro-Israel “neocons” and therefore anti-Muslim. Because the Bush administration was seen as the enemy of Muslims (despite the idiotic “religion of peace” rhetoric of some Republicans), Democrats apparently decided they must be pro-Islam, and began smearing the GOP as “Islamophobic.” This kind of simple-minded partisanship is the only possible explanation for such useful idiots as Taylor Lorenz.

Well, I am not always a Neutral Objective Journalist, because I have personal principles that sometimes obligate me to choose sides. One of these is Genesis 12:3 — an eternal promise of the eternal God, which no Christian should take lightly. More than once in my career, I’ve watched helplessly as right-wing acquaintances have let themselves be pulled into the gravitational orbit of anti-Semitism, which predictably resulted in their destruction. Even while I am willing to stipulate that so-called “neocons” have been responsible for foolish policies (e.g., the invasion and occupation of Mesopotamia, which almost every intelligent conservative now recognizes as a strategic blunder), it is a grievous error to blame such blunders on a “Zionist” conspiracy. However, just as some simple-minded liberals like Taylor Lorenz let themselves be fooled into attacking Pamela Geller as an “Islamophobe,” so also have some people on the Right gone drifting off into toxic Jew-hatred.

Cui bono? Who benefits if the Right allies itself with anti-Semitism, even if what is offered as “evidence” of such an alliance is a thin tissue of guilt-by-association smears fabricated by the Left? The direct beneficiary of this should be obvious — the Democrat Party. Meanwhile, however, we find that conservative Jews like Pamela Geller are libeled as “Islamophobes” by the same dishonest liberal media which would otherwise have us believe that all Republicans are Jew-haters!

No one should be deceived by the Left’s propaganda. Any conservative who is hesitant to defend Pamela Geller (they think she is “extremist” or whatever) is a fool. The reason Geller is under attack is because she is effective and influential, especially in exposing the Left’s sordid de facto alliance with radical Islam. Geller is a ferocious fighter, and we cannot afford to lose her. If we let the Left silence our most powerful voices, what shall become of the rest of us? Who will defend our right to free speech?

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.

Category: Atlas Shrugs, Islam, Liberals, Media Bias

Rule 5 Sunday: Larger Than Life

Posted on | March 5, 2018 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Many years ago, when CPAC was still at the Hotel Formerly Known As The Sheraton Park in DC, Stacy introduced me to Dana Loesch, who was well-known in conservative circles as a talk show hostess but had not yet exploded onto the national scene as the spokeswoman for the NRA. We didn’t have time (or reason) to talk for long, but she left a definite impression. This was a woman who was not going to back down from a fight for any reason, but even in the thick of the fight, she’d be polite and gracious – which then and now drove her enemies batshit crazy. Now, of course, in the wake of the Parkland shootings, she’s found herself on point as the Blue Checkmark Media and other slimes call her and the NRA out for not toeing the Liberal Gun-Grabbing Line. There’s still no give in her, and her graciousness continues, even to those that don’t deserve it.

.@DLoesch is blessing more people this week than the pope.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) March 5, 2018

All this, brains, and graciousness too.

Ninety Miles From Tyranny leads off with Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #181, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. Checking in from Japan, Animal Magnetism sends us Rule Five “Gun Culture” Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL’s herd this week includes Heather Locklear, Jennifer Lawrence, RIP Carl Grimes, Now That’s Hip, Hope Hicks, Sandra Escacena, Loving Vincent, and South African Wine.

A View From The Beach has Patriot Cheerleader – Camille Kostek, If She’s Really This Stupid, I Don’t Want Her Voting Anyway, An Important Question, An Emotional Support Casserole?, #HerToo! Drunk and Stupid is One Way to Go Through Life, This is CNN, How to Lose a Billion Bucks . . ., Portman’s Complaint, Women in Red Dresses, Hot Cars, Apples and Crack and Olympic Babe from Russia Fails Dope Test.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Alyssa Sutherland, his Vintage Babe is Vera Ralston, and Sex in Advertising is covered by Agent Provocateur. At Dustbury, it’s the late Indian megastar Sridevi and Virginia Mayo.

Thanks to everyone for the luscious links!

Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop
Amazon Fashion – Jewelry For Women

Category: Rule 5

The Transgender Victimhood Narrative Continues to Sustain Damage

Posted on | March 4, 2018 | 3 Comments

On Feb. 6, the Buffalo News reported:

A 35-year-old man was fatally shot on Tuesday in the 100 block of Shepard Street, near Pullman Place, Buffalo police said.
The killing is Buffalo’s first confirmed homicide of the year. In 2017, three people were killed on New Year’s Day.
The Shepard Street victim had no permanent address, according to police. He was struck by gunfire just before 5:30 p.m. and declared dead at the scene, Buffalo Police spokesman Michael J. DeGeorge said.
Police have not released the man’s name.

The dead man was later identified as transgender — Tonya “Kita” Harvey — and the district attorney said the murder was being investigated as a possible “hate crime,” although police have arrested no suspects in the shooting and the motive is still unknown. Shepard Street is in a low-income neighborhood on the city’s East Side, where most of Buffalo’s murders happen. There were 41 criminal homicides in Buffalo last year. Less than two weeks after Harvey was murdered on Shepard Street, a 19-year-old man was critically wounded near the same location, and no motive was reported. In other words, it seems likely that “Kita” Harvey just happened to be in a crime-ridden location where it isn’t very unusual for people to get shot. Stories like this contradict the preferred media narrative, as I explained last year:

According to “social justice” advocates, there is an epidemic of anti-transgender violence for which Donald Trump and Republicans are to blame. The only thing wrong with that claim is the complete lack of evidence to support it. LGBT activists and liberal journalists keep calling attention to the murders of “Transgender Women of Color,” and the facts continue contradicting the social-justice narrative.

The East Side of Buffalo voted for Hillary Clinton by a 4-to-1 margin in 2016, and there probably weren’t any Trump voters in the vicinity of Shepard Street when “Kita” Harvey got shot. The same could be said of Cleveland’s West 112th Street:

The victim of a deadly shooting Friday evening [Feb. 23] in the Edgewater neighborhood has been identified.
The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner said the victim is Phylicia Mitchell, 46, of Cleveland. Mitchell was transgender and police spokeswoman Sgt. Jennifer Ciaccia said Mitchell identified as a female.
Mitchell was shot about 6 p.m. Friday on West 112th Street near Detroit Avenue, Ciaccia said.
Mitchell was pronounced dead MetroHealth Medical Center.
No arrests have been made in the shooting, which remains under investigation.

There were 130 murders in Cleveland last year, including the December murder of Jared Plesec, who was shot dead on East 156th Street while wearing his Salvation Army uniform and carrying a Bible. Police say Plesec’s murder was part of a crime spree by William T. Jones, 27, who was charged with aggravated murder, seven counts of attempted murder, multiple counts of aggravated robbery, felonious assault, burglary, grand theft and vandalism. Getting murdered in Cleveland isn’t really difficult, even for Bible-toting Christians, but longtime boyfriend Shane Mitchell admitted Phylicia’s lifestyle was unusually risky:

Mitchell said he helped Phylicia stop being a prostitute and she’d help him whenever he needed some money for bus fare. They were homeless at times and bounced around from place to place . . .
Phylicia and Shane Mitchell struggled to find work because of their addiction to drugs, he said. Shane Mitchell has several drug-related convictions dating back to 1997. He said they often used drugs together and split up for a time when he was in prison.
Shane Mitchell said he tried to talk Phylicia out of using drugs, and the two argued about it two weeks ago. He told her he could no longer live in an environment with someone using drugs, and the two separated.
“We should have never started doing drugs together,” Mitchell said. “We’d have both had an even better life than we already did.”

A drug-addicted ex-prostitute whose boyfriend served time in prison? That’s a dangerous way to live, and an easy way to die, but the media wants to tell us a tale of transgender victimhood that requires us to ignore such obvious risk factors. It’s hate — transphobia! — which must explain these deaths, because any other explanation wouldn’t fit the narrative.

Here’s a story from WJXT in Jacksonville, Fla.:

An individual from Brandon, Florida, was found dead from a gunshot wound in Jacksonville hotel Sunday evening [Feb. 4].
According to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, Cedric DeVonne Walker, 36, was found in a room at the Extended Stay America on Skinner Lake Drive, near the St. Johns Town Center, according to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.
Homicide detectives were called to investigate after the body was found about 8 p.m. Sunday. . . .
In the last six months, there had been six assaults, seven vehicle thefts, 11 vehicle burglaries and 29 thefts within one half mile of the Extended Stay America, according to JSO’s online crime-mapping data.

Cedric Walker was transgender and preferred to be known as “Celine,” so while police were trying to figure out who killed him/“her,” activists were upset about the “misgendering” of the victim:

After authorities in Jacksonville Florida identify transgender murder victim Celine Walker by her deadname earlier this month, the transgender advocacy group T.A.P. (Transgender Awareness Project) is calling for policy change in the way transgender people are identified by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Department. . . .
To not identify murder victims as transgender hampers the authorities ability to solve these murders and properly notify the family of their loved one’s death
T.A.P and the Jacksonville community gathered at Friendship Fountain Saturday, February 10th to remember her life and to bring awareness to what they call misgendering of transgender people. . . .
Transactivist Paige Mahogany Parks says “I’m here to be the voice for her and all of the rest of the transgender women who don’t have a voice that have been murdered.”

Police must now ignore biology, or else be accused of “hate”? And why do “transactivists” think they’re qualified to declare what does or does not hamper the ability of authorities to solve murder cases?

Meanwhile, in California:

Authorities have charged a Los Angeles man with the stabbing death and attempted robbery of a transgender woman whose body was found after a house fire in the Pico-Union district.
Kevyn Ramirez is facing charges of murder during the commission of an attempted first-degree robbery, as well as two counts of arson.
He is accused of killing Victoria “Viccky” Ramos Gutierrez. Investigators say he met the transgender woman online, then early on Jan. 10 he allegedly stabbed her and set her home on fire in the 1700 block of South New Hampshire Avenue.
Ramirez, 29, was arrested within two days of the fire and then charged on [Jan. 16]. . . .
Members of the transgender community stood with law enforcement at the press conference announcing the latest details on the case.
“Every time a lot of community members are murdered senselessly, it’s always something else — it’s always a robbery, it’s always domestic violence,” said Maria Roman, an advocate for the transgender community. “For somebody to stab you and do the things detectives said happened to her, you know it’s fueled by hate.“

Ramirez kills Gutierrez, and “you know it’s fueled by hate,” because that’s the narrative. Everything must have a political explanation that conforms to the “social justice” ideology where Gutierrez is a victim of oppression and Ramirez must be part of a right-wing genocidal plot. It can’t be that people who go trolling for companionship on the Internet are dangerous fools, because where’s the “social justice” angle in that explanation?

“Kita” Harvey, Phylicia Mitchell, Celine Walker, “Viccky” Gutierrez — so far, none of these murders fit the victimhood narrative in which “transphobia” is a Trump-era epidemic. None of these crimes could plausibly be blamed on Republicans, but meanwhile in Albuquerque:

A New Mexico man has been arrested in the death of a prominent former Albuquerque lawyer and his roommate, PEOPLE confirms.
James Knight, 32, also known as Charles Spiess, was charged with two counts of murder Wednesday in the slayings of Eugene Carrell Ray, 70, and 28-year-old Zakaria Fry.
The bodies of Ray, a former assistant attorney general who later opened up a family law practice, and Fry, the transgender woman who rented a room from him, were discovered Feb. 19 in Stanley, a small community about 45 miles east of Albuquerque. . . .
The working theory is that they were all living together, [Albuquerque police officer Simon] Drobnik says. “[Knight] may have been renting a room from Eugene,” says Drobik. “[Eugene] was known to have people stay at his house off the street.”
The motive remains unclear, he says. . . .
Drobik says investigators allege that after Knight killed the two roommates, he stole Ray’s 2000 silver Ford Mustang and used his credit card to buy McDonald’s fast food, dog food as well as duct tape, rope, garbage bags, gloves, Coleman fuel and cleaning supplies, which were “basically used to clean up the bodies and blood.” . . .
Also found in the house were several hypodermic needles and a pile of a white powdery substance on the living room floor.
Ray’s daughter told police that Ray was “involved in a high risk sexual lifestyle in which he befriends unknown persons involved in similar activities,” and that he “routinely allowed persons to stay in his spare bedroom and has been a victim of several property type crimes mostly fraud,” the complaint states.
Police set their sights on Knight after several tipsters identified him as the man seen on video footage purchasing items using Ray’s credit card at Walmart.
One tipster told police that Knight had worked as a male dancer at one of the strip clubs in the Albuquerque area.

So, the freaky 70-year-old retired lawyer with “a high risk sexual lifestyle” has a 28-year-old transgender houseguest, and a 32-year-old male stripper is charged with killing both of them. How does this fit into the transgender victimhood narrative? Not very well, I think.

Nevertheless, “Fry is the sixth known case of deadly anti-transgender violence in the U.S. this year,” according to an LGBT activist group, which doesn’t seem interested in any further analysis. They’re just doing the body count, because “you know it’s fueled by hate,” right?

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