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A lot of legislation is written in a way intended to purposely obfuscate so bureaucrats, who have the responsibility of interpreting, can do anything they want. This is how bureaucrats gain enormous power and allows them to rule our lives in unintended ways.
Then there is legislation that serves one valid purpose but is irrational. An example is requiring those who work, earn money and pay taxes must take a urine test. Yet, those who receive assistance from the very taxes extracted from those who work, do not have to take a urine test. No wonder those who work are "pissed off."
There is also legislation driven by the heart not the head which creates more of the problem it seeks to solve. This legislation unintentionally rewards conduct that should be frowned upon. I have always said if you want more of something throw money at it. Phil Gramm (economist and former Senator) used to say if you are going in the wrong direction speeding up is not the solution.
Finally, all legislation should be reviewed to see if it accomplishes it's goal and that would mean all legislation be placed under a rule requiring it end and must be re-debated and voted upon. We are choking with rules and regulations that do more harm and restrict positive legislation from working .
To his credit, Trump realized this. He unburdened the economy and, lo and behold, it began to do better.
Because government fails more than succeeds and bigger government fails even more so it is no wonder people do not have a favorable impression and turn cynical. This allows those who seek chaos to thrive because they are expert at manipulating discontent. The ideological monsters who control Antifa from their secure faculty positions are a perfect example.
Why then do so called progressive liberals want to expand government? It cannot be because it works better. The only logical conclusion is to create friction which allows more control and thus, increases power. Evil often hides under the umbrella of do-goodism. This is why I always say: "save me from the do-gooders."
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Anti-Trump and dumb Democrats blinded and compelled by their hatred of Trump are prepared to blow it again - bless their hearts.
Ah, but then the truth might eventually appear.(See 1 below.)
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Yes, there is Russian interference alright. While we watch their right hand they keep working with their left. Introduce several termites and in time the entire building will be infested. In an open society it only takes a handful to stir the pot, to disrupt everything and eventually bring it to it's knees. (See 2 below.)
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We all know Al Sharpton Is America's quintessential shake down fraud and a premier. He is the epitome of what Freud meant when he talked about projection. Al projects what he is himself by castigating others for the same behaviour.
Then we have Cummings who is another self-righteous fraud who uses the plight of backs to castigate others as racists. Hopefully most see through all of this.
Once again, Trump is not racist, was not one before he became president and not one after becoming president.
He is unorthodox, counter punches and much of what he says is taken out of context by the mass media which loves to play the race card which has lost much of it's cache. Once Conservatives learn to fight back they will begin to be respected but until then they will continue to allow racists to smear them.
Since becoming president Trump has implemented certain policies that actually benefit blacks, such as:
a) Improving the economy which has resulted in more job opportunities.
b) the middle class and lower economic societal members have benefited disproportionately from the % of wage improvement.
c) Trump has sought to get his hands around illegal immigration which lowers wages and increase job opportunity competition. The problem is blacks do not want these jobs because welfare often produces more income, the jobs are back breaking and/or they lack the educational, social and training skills required.
d) Trump has changed the law with respect to minor crimes resulting in disproportionate incarceration of those in the black community.
e) Most important of all and least talked about is the future benefit that will come from tax relief to those who invest in blighted areas which will eventually bring about improved housing and other infrastructure changes which will enhance neighborhood conditions. Sec. Carson has been instrumental in this effort. Yes, it will take time but it will happen and blossom long after Trump has departed from The White House.
f) Finally, Trump has made every effort to elevate America's respect for our police which are the best defense black citizens have against those who prey on them physically etc. Obama's contempt for the police and those engaged in law enforcement was despicable.
Radical progressives know they are vulnerable to any progress Trump can help bring about because it highlights the vacuum they allowed to occur. The key interest of liberals, and politicians in general, is power to implement policies which have failed and to hold onto the loyalty of the voters who remain enslaved. Rep. Cummings and most of the Black Caucus Members have been playing the race card for years because it has proven effective, has allowed them to retain their seats and given them the opportunity to leverage many of the benefits associated with public trough high chairs. This is the game of politics at it's rawest and slimiest.
Government responds to those who vote and those who vote expect something for their vote and all too often it results in waste, fraud and corruption and 100 dollar bills stuffed in refrigerators and fancy homes and living styles far in excess of what could be acquired through the basic salary structure.
Yes, we have the best government money can buy.
Meanwhile, the radical intellectuals, academics and financial patrons who are behind the leftist take over of the Democrat Party, Antifa and the assorted Muslim organizations are actively engaged in establishing the premise that America was founded by racists and is a totally flawed system. This is why everything about America needs to be changed. This was Obama's theme, this is what Michelle meant when she said she was not proud of America and this is what their Rev. Wright preached for decades but, of course, they never listened and/or were not in attendance. Obama was on the golf course and Michelle took her children to the zoo on Sunday.
Since everything about America is wrong, and more embrace this tripe, the more radicals are now able to bring about change through protest, legislation, discord and rioting etc. This is why 2020 is a watershed and why if the radicals can portray Trump as a racist and win you can kiss old mother liberty goodbye. After all, who wants to be governed by a racist monarch who is coarse, divisive and, most of all, a capitalist. (See 3, 3a, 3b and 3c below.)
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In the previous memo I wrote about our trip home after Max's "bris" and wrote about our side trip To Accident Maryland and visit to this fabulous cheese shop where we had our outdoor lunch etc.
Now Salena has featured it. I do not know if my writing caused her to visit or what? (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)
Trump: A Brawler for Democracy
A weak and unlikely and untutored president beats back a concerted campaign of delegitimization.
By Holman W. Jenkins Jr.
His partisan opponents and those who believe Donald Trump unfit can still try to remove or at least defame him with allegations that he sought to obstruct Robert Mueller’s investigation even if the investigation found no underlying crime.
That’s part of the political game but context is required. If a statement by John Dowd, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, to reporter Byron York is an accurate reflection of reality, then it reflects well on Mr. Mueller. Of his conversations with the special counsel, Mr. Dowd said: “Bob was a big boy about the political side of it. He understood the president had to address the politics of [the collusion investigation]. . . . People were pounding him about this thing every day, both privately and publicly, and he had to take [Mueller] on.”
Politicians, by the time they’ve asked millions for their money, their time, their support and their votes, are obliged to do just about anything to win. Once elected, they have an even bigger responsibility to defend their power and ability to govern. Ask any president: This, and not governing, is what they spend much of their time doing. And one thing you can say about President Trump: This most unlikely and in some ways weakest of presidents has brawled his way to victory over the most concerted delegitimization campaign any president has ever faced.
It ain’t beanbag, as somebody once said, and the Obama administration was not an administration of beanbag players. Don’t kid yourself: Obama veterans played and continue to play key roles in the Trump delegitimization campaign, including as members of the Mueller team.
A moment of honesty is in order even from Mr. Trump’s critics about the fight the president won. Start with the colossal confection of assumed guilt that was Rep. Adam Schiff’s opening statement in Wednesday’s hearing, whose real mistake was reducing everything that is interesting and wondrous (in a sense) about the events that began on the escalator in Trump tower in 2015 to the narrow aperture of Russia. Otherwise, many of Mr. Schiff’s characterizations were true:
Mr. Trump did launch his campaign as an infomercial to promote his personal brand. He didn’t expect to be president. Paul Manafort and others signed up not because they thought he’d win but to advance their business interests. Mr. Trump, expecting he would soon return to private life, kept trying to parlay his newly stratospheric celebrity into a Trump Tower deal in Moscow well into the 2016 campaign.
As this column judged early and often, nobody needed to instruct Vladimir Putin’s trolls to promote the Trump boomlet once it emerged in 2015. It was exactly the kind of democratic unseemliness the Kremlin’s troublemakers exist to exploit. Whatever Russia’s effect, it was trivial in the end. It did not conjure 63 million votes for Mr. Trump—votes that came to him despite an onslaught of innuendo, vilification and authentically disgraceful material covering every aspect of his life, from his sex habits to his racial attitudes, to his business practices and even his alleged eagerness to commit treason with Russia.
The real lesson is the one many continue to ignore: A large part of the electorate so thoroughly defected from the authority of the established media and related elites that it thought anybody with Mr. Trump’s enemies couldn’t be all bad.
If Democrats want to win in 2020, they need to stop lying to themselves about this. They need to stop trying to ignore or shame these voters somehow out of existence.
One more thing: In a rare moment of perspicacity, Mr. Schiff allowed to the New Yorker magazine that the Kremlin’s most consequential impact on the 2016 race may have been the role that still-hidden Russian intelligence played in sparking the shambolic interventions of former FBI Director James Comey.
Mr. Schiff is right about this. Mr. Comey himself indicated that the information is of such sensitivity that it will likely remain hidden “decades from now.” So here’s one reason to support Mr. Trump’s re-election no matter how much nose-holding it requires: It may be the only way to reach the truth of 2016.
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2)In a major upset for the Democratic Party establishment, Rep. Joe Crowley of New York lost his primary election unseated by a young progressive newcomer who reflects restiveness in the left wing of the party.
Ocasio-Cortez did not defeat Crowley alone. She was recruited and supported by a political organization working to hijack the Democratic Party. Our Revolution, the largest Marxist front in America. And yes they love social media--its so easy to fool people there.
In 2016, a political action committee called the Justice Democrats held auditions for candidates willing to endorse their far-left platform. It received over 10,000 nominations. Ocasio-Cortez’s brother submitted her name for the position while she was working at Flats Fix, a taco restaurant in Manhattan. The Justice Democrats selected Ocasio-Cortez and 78 other candidates to run against moderate Democratic incumbents.
Of these candidates, seven won seats in the House of Representatives: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for New York’s 14th District, Ayanna Pressley for Massachusetts’ 7th District, Ilhan Omar for Minnesota’s 5th District, Pramila Jayapal for Washington’s 7th District, Rashida Tlaib for Michigan’s 13th District, Raúl Grinalva for Arizona’s 3rd District, and Ro Khanna for California’s 17th District.
What makes the Justice Democrats unusual is that it has partnered with another political action committee: Our Revolution, the largest Marxist front in America. The goal of both committees is to transform the Democratic Party from within. The Justice Democrats and Our Revolution were formed out of the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign. Claiming more than 100,000 members in 50 states, Our Revolution acts as a front for the three most influential Marxist organizations in America: the Democratic Socialists of America, the Communist Party USA, and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.
Our Revolution is recruiting far-left candidates to run as Democrats in state and local elections, while Justice Democrats are recruiting potential far-left candidates for federal office.
Of the seven current congressional representatives that the Justice Democrats helped win office, two are card-carrying members of the Democratic Socialists of America: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
Most of the Our Revolution leadership comes from the Democratic Socialists of America. But some are members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization or Communist Party USA. Communist Party USA leader John Bachtell explained their strategy for hijacking the Democratic Party in an online webinar on May 23, 2018, when he told an audience of activists from the Democratic Socialists, Freedom Road and Communist Party USA that they must campaign for openly socialist candidates within the Democratic Party as a means of challenging President Donald Trump.
It is not a coincidence that nearly every major proposal of today’s Democratic Party—from single-payer health care, amnesty for illegal aliens, normalization of relations with Communist Cuba, $15 per hour minimum wage, etc—originated with the Communist Party USA or Democratic Socialist of America. Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib may be the only official dsa members in Congress, but all 96 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus are affiliated with political action committees that are effectively part of the world Communist movement.
Now you know a little more of who AOC really is and who is actually behind her...
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3) Black journalist shares videos of Cummings’ district to quell feigned media outrage over Trump tweets
The anti-Trump media is responding with its usual collective uproar over the president posting a series of tweets about what a “dangerous & filthy” mess Rep. Elijah Cummings’ district is, but they are neglecting to offer any context behind the president’s remarks.
Let’s begin with the most important thing — Trump is right and there’s video of the Maryland Democrat’s district that proves it.
Calling Cummings a “brutal bully,” the president pulled no punchesin declaring the House Oversight Committee chair’s district “the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States.”
Predictably, Democrats and their media allies rushed to call Trump a racist because Cummings is African-American. CNN led the way witha ridiculous notion that the term “infested” is a racist code word.
No one bothered to explain what prompted the president to say the things he said and that’s where their narrative folds like a cheap lawn chair.
Just prior to Trump’s tweets, “Fox & Friends” had just aired a segment that featured Kimberly Klacik, a black Republican strategist and Fox News contributor, who was in Cumming’s district. She talked about living conditions in Baltimore, and Trump’s tweets repeated information from this segment.
The segment included a clip of Cummings screaming at acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan about the way illegal immigrant children are treated in detention centers, but more importantly, it featured videos from Klacik backing up her claims about the district.
“There is a crisis at the border, but there’s also a crisis in Baltimore,” Klacik insisted. “Congressman Cummings represents the most dangerous district in America.”
“The conditions in his own district … are atrocious,” she added.
As for President Trump stating that the city “is considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States,” the Baltimore Sun essentially said the same thing.
“Baltimore had the worst homicide rate among the nation’s 50 largest cities last year and the second-highest violent crime rate overall, according to new data from the FBI,” the newspaper reported.
After the segment on “Fox & Friends,” Klacik began sharing video she had taken, the first coming in response to CNN’s Victor Blackwell claiming that Trump’s comments were rooted in racism.
“It is so sad to see @VictorBlackwell & @CNN turn the light currently shining on #WestBaltimore into a race issue,” Klacik tweeted. “This could result in a positive change. @RepCummings could help get his district in order. Listen to one of his constituents explain the ‘rats & rodents’ problem.”
And the GOP strategist was just getting started, as she reminded the Twitter-verse that she too is an African-American.
“Just to be clear I have more videos I filmed this video to show how long many of the row houses have been sitting abandoned. The tree in this home is taller than the actual home itself. This has nothing to do with race, I was trying to show the plight. Also, I am black,” she tweeted along with another video.
On and on it went. With each video she posted the manufactured outrage on the left subsided a little more.
“This is @RepCummings district. This has nothing to do with race,” Klacik stressed when sharing another video.
“Let’s walk through a typical abandoned row house in West Baltimore,” she added. “You will find at least one of these on every street. According to residents, there is an uptick in homeless thanks to the increase in drug inventory post 2015 riots.”
There will be more to come on this story, as Klacik informed followers that she is now being targeted by the intolerant left.
“So I am receiving calls that reporters are working on a hit piece on me,” she tweeted on Saturday afternoon. “It is truly disappointing. Residents asked if I could help get the trash removed. I filmed it, posted it. You would think people would be upset that their brothers & sisters are living in those conditions.”
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3a) California Wants to Teach Your Kids That Capitalism Is Racist
A new model curriculum for ‘ethnic studies’ is a handbook for classroom propagandizing.
By Williamson M. Evers
California’s Education Department has issued an “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” and is soliciting public comments on it until Aug. 15. The legislatively mandated guide is a resource for teachers who want to instruct their students in the field of “ethnic studies,” and was written by an advisory board of teachers, academics and bureaucrats. It’s as bad as you imagine.
Ethnic studies is described in the document as “the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with an emphasis on experiences of people of color in the United States.” But that’s not all it is. “It is the study of intersectional and ancestral roots, coloniality, hegemony, and a dignified world where many worlds fit, for present and future generations.” It is the “xdisciplinary [sic], loving, and critical praxis of holistic humanity.”
The document is filled with fashionable academic jargon like “positionalities,” “hybridities,” “nepantlas” and “misogynoir.” It includes faddish social-science lingo like “cis-heteropatriarchy” that may make sense to radical university professors and activists but doesn’t mean much to the regular folks who send their children to California’s public schools. It is difficult to comprehend the depth and breadth of the ideological bias and misrepresentations without reading the whole curriculum—something few will want to do.
Begin with economics. Capitalism is described as a “form of power and oppression,” alongside “patriarchy,” “racism,” “white supremacy” and “ableism.” Capitalism and capitalists appear as villains several times in the document.
On politics, the model curriculum is similarly left-wing. One proposed course promises to explore the African-American experience “from the precolonial ancestral roots in Africa to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and enslaved people’s uprisings in the antebellum South, to the elements of Hip Hop and African cultural retentions.”
Teachers are encouraged to cite the biographies of “potentially significant figures” such as Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon and Bobby Seale. Convicted cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur are also on the list. Students are taught that the life of George Jackson matters “now more than ever.” Jackson, while in prison, became “a revolutionary warrior for Black liberation and prison reform.” The Latino section’s people of significance include Puerto Rican nationalists Oscar López Rivera, a member of a paramilitary group that carried out more than 130 bomb attacks, and Lolita Lebrón, who was convicted of attempted murder in a group assault that wounded five congressmen.
Housing policy gets the treatment. The curriculum describes subprime loans as an attack on home buyers with low incomes rather than a misguided attempt by the government to help such home buyers. Politicians—Republicans and Democrats—imposed lower underwriting standards on the home-loan industry. Republicans billed it as a way to expand the middle class, while Democrats crowed that it would aid the poor.
In a sample lesson on Native Americans, the curriculum suggests students offer their responses to a fictional environmentalist speech by Chief Seattle as well as an anodyne quote about relationships from the recently deceased rapper Nipsey Hussle. The Chief Seattle error is part of a larger problem. The curriculum perpetuates the myth that the Indians had the same values as present-day ecologists. In truth, Native Americans had a mixed approach to nature. The curriculum writers should have looked carefully at the scholarly evidence presented in Shepard Krech’s 1999 book, “The Ecological Indian”—about, for example, the setting of brush fires that got out of control and the needless killing of buffalo, beaver and deer.
The curriculum lauds bilingual education, but it omits that this program—in which teachers conducted class mostly in Spanish until seventh grade—failed in California and was disliked by much of the Latino community.
The curriculum is entirely wrongheaded when it comes to critical thinking. Critical thinking is described not as reasoning through logic and consideration of evidence but rather a vague deconstruction of power relationships so that one can “speak out on social issues.” Thinking critically “requires individuals to evaluate phenomenon [sic] through the lens of systems, the rules within those systems, who wields power within systems and the impact of that power on the relationships between people existing within systems.”
Such a curriculum presents a serious problem of fairness to students. In a course titled “Math and Social Justice,” will you be graded on having correct answers on the math or politically correct answers on social justice?
This curriculum explicitly aims at encouraging students to become “agents of change, social justice organizers and advocates.” In the sample unit teachers are directed to have students plan “a direct action (e.g., a sit-in, die-in, march, boycott, strike).” Teaching objective history clearly isn’t the goal. Rather, it’s training students to become ideological activists and proponents of identity politics.
Mr. Evers is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He served as assistant secretary of education for planning, evaluation, and policy development during the George W. Bush administration.
3b) Portland’s Antifa Impunity
No one has been charged in the assault on journalist Andy Ngo.
Mr. Ngo was battered on June 29 as he reported on dueling protests. One demonstration included the far-right Proud Boys, and the counterprotest featured leftist groups associated with the extremist Antifa movement. Mr. Ngo has been a critic of Antifa’s militant tactics and its failure to disavow violence and vandalism, and that made him a target. Video footage shows Mr. Ngo being punched and kicked by people in black attire including hoodies and face masks, Antifa’s preferred uniform.
Mr. Ngo was hospitalized for his injuries, which included a brain bleed. A month later he’s still experiencing complications. Mr. Ngo says he sometimes has trouble finishing sentences or remembering common words, and he’s shown symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. He’s undergoing neurophysical and speech therapy, including for a cognitive communication deficit.
The assault “was brief, but it did end up being really traumatic,” he says. Mr. Ngo adds that far-left activists also spread his home address online, and he has continued to receive threats.
In a news conference more than a week after Mr. Ngo’s assault, Mayor Ted Wheeler disputed “the perception that Portland is somehow a lawless city or that somehow Portland is a violent city.” The acts of violence on June 29 “were alarming, they were disturbing, and from my perspective they were completely unacceptable. We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that those who were engaged in acts of violence are brought to justice,” Mr. Wheeler added. Yet no one has been charged in the attack on Mr. Ngo.
Portland Police Chief Danielle Outlaw has proposed a ban on face coverings at demonstrations to identify those who commit violence. “If you knew that you could be easily identified, do you think you would be as inclined to commit that act of violence, or commit that crime?” Ms. Outlaw asked this month. Portland has to do something to deter political violence, or the city will get more of it.
3c)
Woke Racism By Victor Davis Hanson | RUTHFULLY YOURS
Well before Sigmund Freud formalized the idea of “projectionism”—the defense of one’s own shortcomings and sins by attributing them to others—it was a common theme in classical literature and the New Testament: the ridiculing of the mole on someone else’s nose to hide one’s own boil.
The term projection more or less sums up much of the woke identity politics movement, in which obsessions with racial privilege and tribal exceptionalism are justified by accusing others of just such bias.
While such racist projectionism can often be a psychological tic that assuages the guilt of one’s own rank prejudice, just as often accusing others of racism is a peremptory careerist move to win media attention, lucre, or job advancement.
Racists—those who assume those of different races always act collectively in predictable ways, usually far worse than does their own tribe—who charge racism assume that unlike the proverbial wolf crier, there is currently no downside to their hysterias and fantasies.
That is, the racist who for a variety of reasons lobs “Racist!” at others assumes that, even when his tired charges are proven false, in our postmodern society he can argue that these accusations in theory always could be true, and therefore no one would ever accuse a self-identified victim as a racist perpetrator himself.
For example, a Louisiana State University student, who falsely claimed she encountered a noose on campus—supposedly planted by whites to intimidate African-American students such as herself—was hardly contrite when the “noose” turned out to be simply a dangling power wire. Instead of apologizing, the accuser redoubled her claims: “Considering what is currently happening in this country, someone hanging a noose certainly seems plausible . . . Black students all over are being threatened for speaking out. I’ve previously been threatened for talking about race at LSU.”
The Logic of the Tribe
In some sense, today’s hip new racists have adopted the ideology of Lester Maddox and not Martin Luther King, Jr. Segregation, not integration, is the new racist mantra—by dorm, by theme house, by caucus, by safe space, by graduation ceremony.
True intersectionality is impossible for racists—given that competing tribal agendas can never be reconciled. Far from creating force-multiplying woke ideologies by uniting various “identities”—black, Latino, Asian, LGBTQ, female, and non-American—intersectionality becomes a logical contest among professed victims to acquire preeminent tribal victimhood, and with it, DNA-sanctioned superiority.
The logic of the tribe leads to sectarian warfare, not harmony. We see just that when Asians revolt against black and Latino preferences in college admissions. Feminists push back against the endemic misogyny of rap music that is given an intersectional pass to demean women and freely employ the n-word. There is sometimes less, not greater, tolerance for unapologetic homosexuality in supposedly hyper-macho Latino culture. Doctrinaire Islam makes few concessions for the Muslim convert to Christianity; he is still an infidel to be shunned, even killed.
Jussie Smollett hired two black associates to dress up as white Trump-hatted supporters to stage a fake attack on himself. He hoped to gain sympathy as a victim of supposed rampant intersectional racist hatred in the age of Trump. Apparently, only that way would the pathetically desperate Smollett restore his sinking brand and jump start his fading acting career—through becoming an icon of the innocent black man symbolically lynched by predatory whites.
Smollett, himself half-white, accused an innocent large segment of the U.S. population as racist without any worry of the consequences from such false charges. And rightly so: Smollett has faced little pushback, remains in the news, and believes that no one ultimately will dare to charge him as a racist who committed a hate-crime.
The Covington Catholic fiasco illustrated the same modus operandi. Native American activist Nathan Phillips sought media exposure and careerist advantage by deliberately confronting a group of young Catholic students on the National Mall. Phillips hoped the resulting staged optics would show privileged, male, young, white Christians with red MAGA hats haranguing a wizened Native American elder and Vietnam veteran.
Phillips succeeded in his quest for universal victim status, media exposure, and the demonization of the Covington school students, despite being quickly exposed as a faker who never set foot in Vietnam and a serial racial provocateur.
Most of the media bought his ruse and have retreated to the usual fallback defense for faked racist accusations: in a racist America, the charges could in theory have been true, and therefore that they were demonstrably not true this time means little.
Enter the Anti-Enlightenment Squad
The new racism is epidemic among those in the so-called squad, the self-referenced nickname for four media-obsessed, first-term congressional representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who without their daily charges of bias largely would be unknown back-benchers laboring away in obscurity.
Take Pressley’s recent formulation of the new racism at a recent Netroots Nation conference:
If you’re not prepared to come to that table and represent that voice, don’t come, because we don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice. If you’re worried about being marginalized and stereotyped, please don’t even show up because we need you to represent that voice.
In sum, Pressley just outlined the classic anti-Enlightenment mindset: we are all permanent captives of our superficial race, religion, and sexual orientation. We must at all times think, act, and speak in such tribal fashion—and do so monolithically and collectively, in adopting the party line as set down by such elites as those like Pressley herself.
Blacks who oppose affirmative action, or Muslims who recognize Israel, or “queers” whose sexual preferences are incidental, not essential to their personas are thus declared not authentic and thus not to be welcomed by Pressley into the new racialist Democratic Party.
In practical terms, Pressley assumes that whites, reportedly about 70 percent of the population, tune her logic out. That is, they should never take her own racist advice and vote en masse according to their superficial shared skin color. If they did, the 55 percent of actual voters who are white in her otherwise minority-majority congressional district might never have elected someone who, according to her own rationale, is not part of their own tribe.
Ilhan Omar said the following in a 2018 interview with Al Jazeera when asked about purported American paranoiac fear of “Islamic terrorism”:
I would say—our country should be more fearful of white men across our country, because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country. And so if fear was the driving force of policies to keep America safe, Americans safe inside of this country, we should be profiling, monitoring, and creating policies to fight the radicalization of white men.
Omar was not merely racially stereotyping but lying as well. African-Americans, not whites, according to the Department of Justice figures, commit a far larger percentage of the nation’s annual homicides despite comprising a percentage of the population about seven times smaller.
A Jacobin Resurgence
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) of being a racist for criticizing fellow squad members. In turn, Pelosi recently had called Trump a racist for his tweeting and declared that his efforts to secure the border were racist efforts to hurt the nonwhite.
No matter. There is no exemption from being charged with racism for old, rich, white, and liberal females like Pelosi. In the new racist cosmology, the multimillionaire Pelosi can never escape her white privilege. One element of the new racism is thus Jacobinism—the idea that the circle of racists always widens until the racists devour one another with charges that everyone but themselves is insufficiently racially woke.
Smollett taught us that is was not enough for a gay man to be attacked by homophobes, or a liberal crusader to be attacked by right-wing Trumpers, or a black man to be attacked by white racists. In the ever-spiraling rules of woke racism, only a gay, left-wing, and black victim can win singular revolutionary authority—and only when invented Trump fanatics scream racial taunts and routinely patrol the liberal neighborhoods of Chicago nightly armed with bleach and nooses.
On matters of immigration, it is no longer enough to endorse the old bipartisan compromises on border security and amnesties. No longer is it sufficient to advocate making DACA the law of the land and extending amnesty to the “dreamers.” Now instead the border has become an existential question of bringing in millions of supposedly “nonwhite” immigrants—and escorting them as they illegally cross the border—providing them with amnesty, legal residency, sanctuary from immigration enforcement, and free health care, while calling anyone a “racist” who complains that such caravan immigration is not diverse, legal, measured or meritocratic.
Anti-Semitism Again
Another trait of the new racism is the old anti-Semitism. Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, and Tlaib want Congress to endorse the anti-Israeli boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement to isolate the Jewish democracy—as if Israel was an international outlaw far worse than China, North Korea, or Iran.
Omar (“Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”) has likened her effort to endorse BDS to the 1930s humane boycott of Nazi Germany. Earlier she claimed, with a clumsy “two Benjamins” metaphor, that naïve Americans were deluded by Jewish money and Benjamin Netanyahu into supporting Israel against their supposed own interests.
Ocasio-Cortez believes the detention centers at the border (where far fewer illegal aliens have died annually than during the Obama administration) are analogous to Nazi concentration camps and thus by extension the Holocaust. Apparently, she believes that the 218 tragic deaths in 2018 at the border (471 died in 2012), as a result of a massive wave of illegal migrants into the United States, is analogous to the 6 million Jews who were gassed or starved to death during World War II.
In the puerile mind of honor student Ocasio-Cortez, the 15,000-20,000 Jews who died on some days in the Nazi death and concentration camp archipelago are analogous to 218 accidental deaths at the border of those who entered the United States illegally en masse. When everything is the Holocaust and everyone is a Nazi, then nothing is and no one is. It is hard to calibrate whether Ocasio-Cortez’s anti-Semitic editorializations were designed to downplay the Holocaust or libel her own country—or both.
Being a woke anti-Semite is no longer any big deal. Just ask woke novelist Alice Walker, who is a fan of unapologetic anti-Semite David Icke—or for that matter the woke New York Times that published two anti-Semitic cartoons. For the woke, no one cares about having his picture taken with Louis Farrakhan (Barack Obama included) or mouths anti-Semitic tropes like Georgia congressman Hank Johnson’s comparison of Jewish settlers to “termites.”
What will put an end to this new anti-enlightenment racism of the woke? It will cease only when the majority of Americans are brave enough to call out those projectionists who are obsessed with racism as the purveyors of hate themselves, the sad and the pathetic who believe they are innately and collectively superior on the basis of their superficial appearance or creed.
4)
Rural America, 'romanticism,' and open minds
ACCIDENT, Maryland — Hours before the festivities began, generations of families were lining up along U.S. Route 219, which is Main Street in this Garrett County town. Armed with coolers of ice, folding chairs, and old blankets and dressed in colorful patriotic clothing, they came to watch the 100-year-old homecoming parade that celebrates their community and the bold beginning of our independence.
Anticipation, that sweet pang of excitement and eagerness that’s becoming less common in an age of instant gratification, was tangible as nostalgia swept the old and novelty thrilled the young.
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