More Free Speech Resistance. Anti-Trump Election? Mark Steyn Let's Fly. France Down The Tube.. Saved By Their Foreign Legion?
More College Campus resistance because liberals , progressives and fascists do not want to hear what others have to say if it disagrees with their own bile nor do they want others to hear. (See 1 below.)
Two new books on campus problems:
Free Speech on Campus, Penn Press, 2017 by Sigal R. Ben-Porath and
The Case For Contention - Univ. of Chicago Press by Jonathan Zimmerman.
I have read neither nor am I likely to but I did read reviews in the Pennsylvania Gazette's Nov/Dec 2017 issue.
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More take by The WSJ regarding the anti-Trump election. (See 2 below.)
Maybe I am working overtime trying to be objective but it seems to me the mass media are successful in making Tuesday's election a referendum on Trump, when, in fact, no Republican was doing anything to defend him yet they were being tagged by those who hate him.
Trump has made achievements but you would never know it from the mass media who want their pound of flesh for the abuse they have taken from him.. If Republicans are incapable of identifying, explaining and defending his accomplishments, which, granted, are more hidden yet are responsible for improvements in business confidence,which have led to the rise in the market and decline in unemployment, they are not only damn fools but will really lose because of cowardice.
Between Trump's own flaws and the anti-Trump hatred and mass media's bias the bad mouth has successfully been put on Trump. The bad mouth is hard to erase/brush away. No amount of pointing to the mess Trump inherited will satisfy those who want to bring him down because their hatred is emotionally based. No amount of explanation will change their minds because of their contempt for the man who beat their cherished Hillary.
This is the dilemma Republicans face and much of it is due to their own behaviour and incompetence. If they think blaming Trump and/or distancing themselves from his policies will save their behinds they will go down to an even more colossal defeat and deservedly so.
If voters think they will be better off with a Schumer led Senate and/or a Pelosi led House they will soon find out how wrong they are but then these are the same voters who still believe Obama was the second coming. That said, it is hard to defend a McConnell led Senate which has accomplished nothing but proven they are driven by rancor more than reason and a Ryan led House which has proven equally flaccid when it comes to fighting.
Meanwhile, Trump's trip to Asia is going well and the mass media hardly cover it. If Republicans are unwilling or afraid t back their own president then voters will have no reason to do so either.
Woe is us!
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From a friend and avid memo reader responding to a previous memo in which I commented about The Landing's Folk and Savannah, "Dick, your comments on Savannah are spot on!
Like you I got to see Savannah in the late 60's, we had friends that had moved from Niagara Falls to Savannah (he worked for the Port Authority), we visited and Broughton was a disaster, but interestingly, you could see the possibilities of improvement were there. Today Savannah is a gem; if they could just get the black drug dealers to stop shooting each other it would be prefect! I love downtown, but I have to admit when we go down at night, I "carry".
As an aside, I always love it when some "native" complains about "The Landings", I know of at least a half dozen cities in New York state that would kill to have an involved community like the Landings just outside their city limits. I do wish, the people relocating here to escape the weather and high taxes and regulations they have in Illinois, NY, NJ, etc., wouldn't bring their Liberal bullshit with them!! B--"
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Mark Steyn on Donna and Hillary and guns and identity politics.. (See 3 below.)
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France going down the tube? According to this author , the answer is yes.
My stereotypical view of the French.
When it comes to intestinal fortitude the French would rather drink wine and eat cheese. I spent 18 months in service in France. I loved my time there. I lived in two small villages outside Orleans and, at the time - 1955-'56, the Communist Party was strong in both :Mer Sur Loire and Beaugency. The French seem readily willing to succumb than fight and even when they fight they generally lose. They see themselves as lovers not fighters.
Is their approach toward life about to cause them to lose their precious country. or can the Foreign Legion save them? ( See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)
A conservative is invited to speak on a college campus and the leftists won’t have it!
The speaker is accused of being a dangerous, hateful, sexist, Islamophobic, xenophobic, homophobic, racist bigot – and worse.
Students, administrators, and campus organizations mobilize to shut down the event.
The media is complicit, with libelous opinion pieces masquerading as news stories, filled with cherry-picked or manufactured quotes in support of the protestors’ agenda.
If the event isn’t cancelled, additional and expensive security measures are required to protect the speaker and the audience from the protestors. Often these “peaceful” protests turn violent, resulting in injuries and property damage.
Free speech and the open exchange of ideas take another hit.
In an event sponsored by the University of Wyoming chapter of Turning Point USA, Dennis is scheduled to speak on Thursday, November 9, on the topic “Why Socialism Makes People Selfish.”
In response, the student government’s Director of Diversity and other students want to shut the event down.
Calling Dennis’ past comments “bigoted,” “horrific,” and “disgusting” – and Dennis a “racist, homophobic, xenophobic, red-baiting, anti-academic, climate denying, rape apologist” – the protest organizers want to “prevent him from speaking here” and “don’t want people who spout hate speech on [our] campus.”
As usual, the protestors have been abetted by the media. The Gillette News Record (in an article that purports to be news) calls Dennis “a polarizing conservative figure with a history of controversial statements and positions,” and a “conservative firebrand.”
“This is yet another example of the illiberal left’s attempt to shut down free speech on college campuses. Rather than simply choosing not to attend, or offering a dissenting viewpoint in an informed, respectful and courteous manner, their preferred approach is to intimidate and shut down conservative speakers. They’ve even resorted to calling me, a practicing Jew, anti-Semitic and a neo-Nazi.”
“Liberals have always embraced the competition of ideas and believed that if their idea is the best, it will ultimately win the day. But liberalism has essentially died on American campuses – killed by leftists. My belief – in part because of the fact that PragerU has already garnered 500 million views this year – is that over time young Americans will come to understand the threat the left poses to all that is beautiful and good in American life. And that they will see who the real haters and bigots are.”
“I look forward to speaking at the University of Wyoming – and doing so in the same respectful and rational manner I have always spoken. I also look forward to answering every question and challenge students wish to pose. I cannot promise that I will change the mind of every student who comes; I can, however, promise that most students will wonder why anyone at their university called me a bigot and a hater.”
If you are in college please consider joining PragerFORCE, the most influential digital army of conservative students fighting the left on the newest and largest battlefield in the War of Ideas: social and digital media. If you know a college student, tell them about PragerU and PragerFORCE and please continue to share our PragerU videos with as many people as you can.
With your help, we can give the story a new ending. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 2)
The Anti-Trump Wave
Democrats come out in droves and the GOP is caught in the undertow.
ByThe Editorial Board
The Democratic sweep in New Jersey and especially Virginia is in that sense a mirror image of what Republicans did in 2009 in opposition to Barack Obama. Chris Christie won in the Garden State that year and after two mostly failed terms Democrats are taking Trenton back under public-union control. Governor-elect Phil Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs millionaire, is a 360-degree progressive who wants to raise taxes, increase spending and in the process will drive even more taxpayers from the state.
The more consequential message came from Virginia, where Democrats swept the major statewide offices and may have picked up the 17 seats they needed to take over the House of Delegates. Ralph Northam, the lieutenant governor who beat a Bernie Sanders acolyte in the primary, spent most of his time and money wrapping Donald Trump around Republican candidate Ed Gillespie.
Republicans can take little comfort that Hillary Clinton defeated Mr. Trump by five points in 2016. Mr. Gillespie lost by nine and he badly underperformed in Northern Virginia, home to federal employees and white, college-educated suburbanites who dislike Mr. Trump’s polarizing politics by insult. In his 2014 near-miss Senate race, Mr. Gillespie won pivotal Loudoun County by 456 votes. On Tuesday he lost it by 23,432.
Mr. Trump tried to distance himself from the defeat by tweeting from Asia that “Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for. Don’t forget, Republicans won 4 out of 4 House seats, and with the economy doing record numbers, we will continue to win, even bigger than before!” Sometimes Mr. Trump’s comments are so transparently false you wonder if he’s laughing as he writes.
Earlier on Election Day he tweeted support for Mr. Gillespie, whom he endorsed. The House victories in GOP-leaning districts Mr. Trump cites were also far closer than they should have been. Mr. Trump is motivating Democrats to vote while his divisive style and rhetoric are dividing Republicans. A Trumpian candidate nearly beat Mr. Gillespie in the primary and refused to endorse him until the end of the campaign as Mr. Gillespie appeared to be gaining in the polls.
Mr. Trump’s media allies are blaming Mr. Gillespie for not being Trumpian enough, but days before the election former White House aide Steve Bannon was saying Mr. Gillespie might win because he had endorsed Trumpian themes of crime and immigration.
The truth is that Mr. Gillespie tried to span the GOP coalition by campaigning on traditional themes of tax cuts and education reform while running against illegal immigration and sanctuary cities. The media portrayed the latter as divisive and racist, but note that Mr. Northam came out against sanctuary cities late in the campaign. Mr. Gillespie did the best he could to bridge the GOP divide in a Democrat-leaning state, but he couldn’t overcome the anti-Trump wave.
The message for Republicans going into 2018 is that they are in trouble in the swing suburban districts where the House will be won or lost. Republicans hold seats in 23 districts where Mrs. Clinton also won. One is the 10th Congressional District in North Virginia held by the estimable Barbara Comstock that includes much of Loudoun County. Democrats will run as a check on Mr. Trump, and Republicans need a response beyond a Nancy Pelosi fright mask.
Another message is that the GOP success down-ballot during the Obama years can go rapidly in reverse. That’s clear from the GOP rout in the Virginia House of Delegates. But there’s also evidence from Rob Astorino’s defeat as executive of Westchester County in New York, a state Senate seat in Washington that gives Democrats a majority, and a GOP incumbent mayoral loss in Manchester, N.H. American politics is more national than ever, and if Mr. Trump’s approval rating stays at 38% next year, the GOP’s state gains could wash away.
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Mr. Trump won’t change, so the only GOP antidote to a Democratic wave is legislative accomplishment. Democrats will be motivated to vote no matter what Congress does. But Republicans will stay home unless the House and Senate fulfill their campaign promises. This means passing a pro-growth tax reform that will accelerate the expansion. Republicans should also realize how much damage they have done to themselves by failing to repeal even a part of ObamaCare.
More broadly, the election shows that the American system of democratic checks and balances is working. All the media and academic panic about looming fascism has been nonsense. The tides of politics ebb and flow, and Tuesday’s results show that the Trump years are likely to be good for Democrats.
3) Donna e Mobile by Mark Steyn Posted ByRuth King
https://www.steynonline.com/8239/donna-e-mobile
A couple of thoughts on the passing parade:
~Political memoirs are almost always boring, self-serving, committee-written and unreadable – Hillary’s What Happened being merely an especially bloated example. So Donna Brazile, hitherto one of the Clintons’ loyalest acolytes, might have been expected to turn in a more or less typical insider account of a flop campaign, worth neither your time nor money. Instead, she has confirmed what some of us charged at the time – that the Democrat establishment succeeded in doing to Bernie what the GOP establishment tried but failed to do to Trump: steal the nomination away from the insurgent.
Sanders vs Trump would have made it a much tougher race, and I suspect Bernie could have held a couple of those rust-belt states. But that match-up never happened, because, while the Republicans’ institutional corruption is ineffectual, the Democrats’ is lethal and all too effective. Ms Brazile’s publisher should have made a last-minute title-change and called the book What Really Happened. As is customary with the Clinto Nostra, Donna is now being accused of being a squealer and a turncoat: As the union heavies say in On the Waterfront, you’re supposed to stay D’n’D – deaf and dumb. Ms Brazile, of course, was previously head of the DNC, which is dumb’n’complicit.
I heard, I believe, Jessica Tarlov talking about this the other day, and regretting that the Brazile fracas had reopened the party divisions between the Sanders progressive wing and the Clinton moderate faction. But that’s not really what the divide is, is it? The party split is between Sanders social-justice warriors and the Clintons’ dynastic kleptocracy. And if the latter is what “moderation” and “centrism” look like, why be surprised that Dem foot-soldiers are lurching lefter? Kleptocrat centrism appeals only to wannabes – whether Clinton bagmen like Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, who’d like to get a piece of the sleazy deals with Kazakh oligarchs; or media suck-ups who wish they were getting Clinton-sized six-figure sums from Goldman Sachs for speeches nobody wants to listen to.
Beyond that, kleptocrat centrism has no takers: In leftie parties around the world, it requires some effort to wean youthful idealists off their starry-eyed utopianism, and corrupt, entitled, pay-for-play Clintonism isn’t going to cut it. I made this point at the dawn of the 2016 presidential cycle in early 2015:
Leaving the studio, I ran into [Democrat pollster Doug Schoen] emerging from makeup and he upbraided me for my hostility to Hillary – which I felt bad about, because I’ve always gotten on well with him, and we have a shared interest in demography and whatnot. Twenty months later, Doug has caught up to my view.
But few other centrist Dems have. Yet the question underpinning Donna Brazile’s book is pretty basic: What do genuinely moderate Democrats have to show for mortgaging their brand to the Clinton Foundation? Me again:
Hillary got rich, Bill got laid, Republican virtue got screwed. Like the sickly leaders of late-Soviet politburos, both appear older and feebler than their years: once the star performer of the double-act, Bill staggers around like the Blowjob of Dorian Gray; the life has all but literally been sucked out of him. His straight-woman, once the reliably stolid, stone-faced Margaret Dumont of his cigar-waggling routine, now has to be propped up on street bollards and fed lines by her medical staff. When she shuts down and she’s out cold, who’s driving the pantsuit? Huma? Cheryl? Podesta? Bill and Hillary have been consumed by their urges. America would be electing the Walking Dead, insatiable and fatal to the touch, but utterly hollow.
As long as “centrism” is cornered by the Clintocracy, the Democrats will continue to drift left and lefter. Clean house, or go full antifa.
~The reason the Sutherland Springs killer was able to get his guns turns out to be a fairly typical bureaucratic cock-up:
A day after a gunman massacred parishioners in a small Texas church, the Air Force admitted on Monday that it had failed to enter the man’s domestic violence court-martial into a federal database that could have blocked him from buying the rifle he used to kill 26 people.
So we need to pass even more duplicative or contradictory laws against this and that in order to increase the likelihood that the government paperwork shufflers will comply with the one that might have made a difference.
Whenever the left is talking about “gun control”, they’re lessening their chance of ever getting any. Americans like their guns and, even more fiercely, their right to have them. So the only way you could impose “gun control” is by sly, subtle, barely detectable measures that steal gun rights away bit by bit in the dead of night. When the Dems demand a “national conversation” on the subject, they’re ensuring they’ll lose.
A more novel angle on US murder rates comes from Ethan Epstein in The Weekly Standard:
It’s true that roughly 11,000 Americans are murdered each year by gunshots,according to the CDC. That’s a rate of 3.5 deaths per 100,000 Americans.
The total homicide rate in the U.S., meanwhile, is 5.0 deaths per 100,000, meaning the non-gun homicide rate is 1.5 per 100,000 Americans. And here’s the thing: at 1.5 per 100,000, our murder rate is still higher than many of our peer nations. Sweden’s murder rate is 1.15; Denmark’s is .99; Australia’s, .97; Germany and Greece each have murder rates of .85 per 100,000. Spain comes in it .66, Ireland at .64. Japan’s is an amazing .31 per 100,000.
So even if we removed every gun homicide in America, we would still be significantly more violent than other countries. And in a way, that’s much, much more disturbing than the fiction that America’s violence problem is one of technology, and not of deep societal rot.
I’m not sure Japan’s 0.31 is that “amazing”. Japan has zero “diversity”, and diversity, as part of its general destruction of social trust, may also make one inured to homicide. A Japanese man can identify with almost any of his country’s few murder victims: she’s like your niece, or mother, or the lady down the street. Can a spinster in rural Vermont relate to another blood-drenched weekend’s statistics from Chicago in any meaningful way?
As for “deep societal rot”, I fear that that is where we’re headed – the speed with which we move on from each record-breaking massacre suggests that we are perforce coming to hold life cheaper, which in turn ensures that it will become cheaper still.
~Kirkus is a rather dull publication that has a massively disproportionate influence over which new books are ordered by libraries and (surviving) bookshops. Thanks to the novelist Lionel Shriver (a recent Mark Steyn Show guest) I now know that their “young adult fiction” reviewers are obliged to “identify all characters by race, religion and sexual orientation“. The editors further insist on assigning books to “own voices” reviewers – that’s to say, if you write a novel about a person of orientation, Kirkus will have it reviewed by someone orientationally appropriate. Alas, this meticulous policy doesn’t always work:
Laura Moriarty’s American Heart is a dystopian tale about a white 15-year-old girl who meets an Iranian academic on the run and comes to realise that America’s corralling all its Muslims into internment camps is not very nice. Thus the Kirkus editor-in-chief assigned the book to a female ‘observant Muslim of colour’. The Muslim reviewer gave the novel an enthusiastic notice, which merited the coveted Kirkus star.
And that’s when it all went south:
Crusaders on social media (most of whom hadn’t read the book) denounced Moriarty’s novel as promoting a ‘white-saviour narrative’. Kirkus took the review down. Asked if she would please like to reconsider her appraisal in light of the frenzy online, the reviewer rewrote her review to be more critical. Kirkus posted the new version. It retracted the star.
This seems perhaps a trivial story after the item on murder, but in fact they’re different points on the same continuum: Weekly bloodbaths are de-humanizing, but so too is identity-politics cultural enforcement. And the latter contributes just as much to “deep societal rot”.
France's authorities and elites are tearing up, piece by piece, the country's historical, religious and cultural legacy so that nothing remains. A nation dispossessed of its identity will see its inner strength broken.
No French terrorist who went to cut off heads in Syria lost his citizenship. The magazine Charlie Hebdo is now receiving new death threats, and no major French publication expressed solidarity with their murdered colleagues by drawing Islamic caricatures. Many of the French intelligentsia have been dragged in courts for alleged "Islamophobia".
The martyrdom of Father Jacques Hamel at the hands of Islamists has already been forgotten; the site of the massacre is still waiting for a visit from Pope Francis as a sign of condolence and respect.
France "sacrificed the victims to avoid fighting the murderers". — Shmuel Trigano, sociologist.
France is about to commemorate the victims of the terror attacks of November 13, 2015. What has been achieved in the two years since the attacks?
The French authorities are sending compensation to more than 2,500 victims of the jihadist attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis, who will be compensated with 64 million euros. Important victories were also attained by anti-terrorism forces. According to an enquiry by the weekly L'Express, in the last two years, 32 terrorist attacks were foiled, 625 firearms were seized, 4,457 people suspected of having jihadist links were searched, and 752 individuals were placed under house arrest. But the general impression is that of a country "frailing from within".
A medic tends to a victim of a terrorist attack in Paris, France, November 13, 2015. (Photo by Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images)
In 1939, a Spanish anti-Fascist journalist, Manuel Chaves Nogales, fled to France, where he witnessed the collapse of the French Republic under German assault. His book, The Agony of France, could have been written about today. Nogales wrote that while the German soldiers were marching through Paris, the French were swarming out of movie theaters, "just in time for the apéritif at the bistro".
After two French girls were murdered by an Islamist in Marseille last month, the social commentator Mathieu Bock-Côté wrote that France is experiencing "a process of national and civilizational decomposition that the authorities have decided to accompany and moderate, without claiming to fight and overthrow it, as if it were unavoidable". He seem to have got it right.
The previous French president, François Hollande, did not even try to get re-elected; his successor, Emmanuel Macron, refuses to talk about Islam and appears to accept the permanent capitulation to the state of fear and emergency. The French army failed to liberate Raqqa, Syria as it promised after the attacks. "France will destroy ISIS", Hollande said after the carnage in Paris; but it was US and Kurdish forces that liberated the Islamic State's de facto capital. 15,000 French Islamists are now being monitored by the French intelligence services. Meanwhile, in the last ten years, 40,000 Jews have fled France.
The safety of ordinary French people is no longer guaranteed. Islamist violence can arise anywhere to strike those who wear a uniform and those who do not. All French citizens are now targets in a war where, for Islamist terrorists, everything is allowed.
In France's parliament, "Islamo-Leftist" voices are becoming increasingly bold. The political class distracts itself with "inclusive writing" at school; in vitro fertilization for singles and gays and on-the-spot fines for "sexist" harassers. No French terrorist who went to cut off heads in Syria lost his citizenship. The magazine Charlie Hebdo is receiving new death threats; no major French publication expressed solidarity with its murdered colleagues by printing Islamic caricatures. The victims' relatives published books entitled, You Will Not Have My Hate. Many of the French intelligentsia have been dragged into court for alleged "Islamophobia".
Meanwhile, no Islamist enclave inside the secular Republic has been reclaimed, and only 19 Salafist mosques have been closed.
The French parliament recently found it urgent to strip the politician Marine Le Pen of immunity after she tweeted photographs of victims of ISIS, including that of the US journalist James Foley. "Daesh is THIS!", she wrote in a post accompanying the photographs and using the Arabic acronym for ISIS. So, a country that that suffered 250 murders at the hands of ISIS removed political protection to a leader, who is already under police protection, for having spread the images of victims of ISIS, and thereby opening the door for her prosecution
The martyrdom of Father Jacques Hamel at the hands of Islamists has been forgotten; the site of the massacre is still waiting for a visit from Pope Francis as a sign of condolence and respect. French judges are now busy removing Christian symbols from the landscape: last month in Ploërmel, the cross above a statue of Pope John Paul II was ordered dispatched for allegedly violating the separation of church and state
Paris's Mayor Anne Hidalgo recently banned the city's main Christmas market for being insufficiently elegant. France's authorities and elites are tearing up, piece by piece, the country's historical, religious and cultural legacy so that nothing will remain. But a nation dispossessed of its identity will see its inner strength broken. Samuel Pruvot, a journalist for Famille Chrétienne("Christian Family"), recently claimed that Christianity in France will be soon found in "museums"
French culture, for the past two years, has been marked by "the sentiment of the end of the world". Intellectuals from both the left and right have been publishing essays about the "suicide of France", its "decadence" and its "unhappy identity". These are brilliant and important takes on the current state of French society. France now needs to go beyond mourning. It needs to show strength -- the will to prevail
France now needs to start fighting the ideological war, the most important one after arrests and the seizure of weapons. If France does not do that, November 13, 2015 will be remembered as the day in which France, as the sociologist Shmuel Trigano said, "sacrificed the victims to avoid fighting the murderers".
Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.
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