Here’s podcaster, tech investor and conservative orthogonal thinker Hotep Jesus (born Bryan Sharpe) interviewing Dilbert creator and persuasion expert Scott Adams on a wide variety of topics.
A wide-ranging discussion of the Wuhan coronavirus, race relations, etc. Food for thought.
I know people have been busy focusing on all the rioting and other Social Justice Warrior insanity, but the inexorable march toward the November general election continues, and first up is Biden passing a big milestone. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Bloomberg has him at 2,004 pledged delegates, exceeding the threshold of 1,991, plus 372 “super delegates.”
So just how is Grandpa Simpson going to adapt to a party where a significant fraction of the young members are rioting and want to abolish police departments? He would like a word with “the youths.”
Three and a half years later, as American streets fill nightly with young protesters, no one can quite agree on where Joe Biden stands. Is he running ahead of Clinton among the youngest voters owing to their hatred of Trump — and therefore even more securely buckled into the electoral driver’s seat than widely assumed? Or is Biden lagging dangerously behind Clinton’s pace — far enough back that he needs to significantly retool his youth outreach to beat Trump, no matter how unexpectedly strong his position may be among traditionally Republican groups like older voters and suburbanites? And, most urgently, have the recent weeks of unrest simply served to highlight the vast divisions between Biden and Trump — whose unacceptability to younger Americans deepens by the day — or are they instead underscoring a significant disillusionment with all politics, in particular among young black voters, that could spell trouble for the Democrat?
The confusion is understandable: One CNN analysis of national polling in April showed Biden roughly ten points short of where Clinton was among 18-to-34-year-olds after he was routinely destroyed by Bernie Sanders among this group in the primaries. But the well-respected Harvard Institute of Politics’ poll of 18-to-29-year-olds released a few days later placed Biden right around the 60 percent goal Mook had mentioned, and the former vice-president has consistently led national polls of the entire electorate. Plus, while many Democrats are worried that the protests show young voters ready to make a significant break from voting as a tool of politics as usual, others are convinced they are actually energizing this group to become further involved — usually pointing to the voter-mobilization groups boasting blockbuster registration numbers in recent days.
This ambiguity has led Democrats to their strategically safest conclusion: They might as well step things up. So in recent weeks, Biden ramped up his digital-outreach hiring and announced the launch of a new, discrete effort within his campaign to marshal resources specifically around organizing young voters. He’s appeared on new kinds of platforms for him, like Megan Rapinoe’s Instagram Live and with Don Cheadle on The Shade Room, while party groups focused on youth turnout, like the Tom Steyer–funded NextGen America, have formally begun orienting more of their programs toward electing him. And, as the protests over the police killing of George Floyd have grown, those close to Biden have been considering calls for him to directly address his involvement with the 1994 crime bill as a way of engaging young black voters about his own growth, and assuaging their concerns. (One Wilmington youth pastor last week urged Biden to do so directly; Stacey Abrams, a potential Biden running mate, soon after told me, “If that is what young people need, then that is what they should have.”)
Here’s the new head of Biden’s youth outreach group:
Some polling and wishful thinking strategy talk snipped.
Senior Democrats see that the youngest voters clearly prefer Biden to Trump, but they still need to organize them to actually vote for the man who, according to CNN’s analysis, won only 16 percent of Democratic primary voters under 30. “A lot of Biden’s support [among young voters] is soft support, so he has to shore up youth support, but also make sure to target all the people who say they don’t know and might vote third party,” explained Ben Wessel, the executive director of NextGen, which endorsed Biden in May and has pledged to spend $45 million this year. “What’s really clear is that Trump has a ceiling of about 33 percent with these folks — I don’t think there’s any risk they’re going to go to Trump. [Democrats] just have to make sure they’re going to Biden.” Now, especially amid the protests, senior Democrats have identified this task as a top priority for Biden — many believe he needs to work hardest to reach black and Latino Americans who feel disengaged from politics and not just the ones who supported Sanders in the primary.
In late May, the Biden team announced steps it would take toward these ends, forming an effort it calls “League 46” to bring the campaign’s various youth-outreach strands under one umbrella hoisted by senior adviser Symone Sanders. The idea is to have a centralized hub for the campaign’s youth organizing and also to mobilize surrogates, including young lawmakers and activists, to expand Biden’s network with youth voters through events like Zoom happy hours. Already, organizers have held a handful of virtual brunches for young battleground-state voters that are focused on specific topics, like policies to support minority-owned small businesses.
Yeah, there’s nothing young people love more than Zoom happy hours and brunch.
Still, some of the usual tools for organizing students may be of limited use in the coming months if colleges begin the fall semester virtually. Wessel, whose group has a major presence on swing-state campuses, pointed out that most students would still likely be in the states where they go to school, but at home. That makes messaging to large groups of students at once trickier, and Democrats are making plans to be as present as possible on the virtual versions of those quads and dorms: “There are so many campus-based meme pages where you can spread content dedicated to people usually on those campuses,” he said. He cited the University of Wisconsin at Madison as an example: The “UW-Madison Memes for Milk-Chugging Teens” Facebook group has nearly 28,000 members; the school has around 32,000 undergraduates.
I could quote more about their digital outreach plans, but it’s right there where political speak, marketing speak, and tech speak collide, and “engagement” is built on abstractions of abstractions of abstractions, without the benefit of hard-dollar results to measure effectivity. “What is the way to do TikTok that is substantive, on brand for him, and allows him to be the version of himself that has, historically, resonated with young people?” Why, is this not hell?
“Hey Joe, where do you stand on defunding police?” “A refund for Grease? Never saw it!”
“In the last week alone, two prospects who were initially not considered among the top tier [Vice Presidential] contenders have suddenly burst into contention: Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Florida Rep. Val Demings.” Guess what they have in common.
If I were Joe Biden and had a son that got kicked out of the military for doing crack, married his brothers widow and got a stripper pregnant, I would not start talking about the 10 to 15 percent of Americans that aren’t good people. but you do you joe and I will do me
Evidently BidenMarch is an organization that wants another candidate at the top of the ticket because Biden isn’t woke enough. Will they succeed? Eh, probably not. DNC might still replace Biden as they candidate, but BidenMarch will have jack-all to do with it…
Shot and three chasers:
After President Trump implemented his travel ban from China on January 31, Joe Biden said in Iowa "this is no time for Donald Trump's record of hysterical xenophobia and fear-mongering." pic.twitter.com/gru4jsiCVf
Joe Biden also wrote in a USA Today op-ed on January 27 that travel bans during the ebola epidemic would have been "reactionary" and "would have made things worse"https://t.co/stDv5NKx07pic.twitter.com/sSGz1zontP
Ben Shapiro debunks the myth that police kill black men at a high rate because of racism.
“If you look at the Washington Post database of how many people in America were black and unarmed and shot by police in 2019, in the Washington Post database the answer in 2019 was nine. If you want to talk about the number of black Americans who were shot who are unarmed and who are not fleeing from police the answer is three. Does that sound like the extermination of black people across the country? It does not.”
“A police officer is 18 and a half times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is likely to be killed by a police officer.”
“A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philly Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects.”
Amidst a week of rioting and looting, New York Times writers finally found a topic they were united on: outrage over an editorial by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton saying president Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act to use federal troops to stop the violence. Their asinine rationale was this exposed black staffers to “violence.” Well, only if they’re rioters. They were outraged that the house organ of the Democratic Media Complex has to pretend there are other opinions than their own, and that anyone would dare stand up to the sanctified violence of Social Justice.
“Social Justice” is more than an ideology, it’s an all-consuming civil religion for the unchurched. To oppose it is to be evil, full stop. Against evil, any weapon or action is automatically sanctified.
Acknowledging the existence of other opinions is sinful, as it distracts from the mission of smiting the unrighteous.
This is why Antifa was so hot on burning churches and defacing synagogues: Competing religions that stand in their way must be destroyed.
This new religion demands the Orwellian dismantling of language so that the actions of the anointed are always sanctified: Social Justice Warrior violence is free speech, while the free speech of others is violence.
The real religion of American progressives is anti-racism. You know who said so in 2015? The African-American linguist John McWhorter, who wrote:
An anthropology article from 1956 used to get around more than it does now, “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema.” Because my mother gave it to me to read when I was 13, of course what I remember most from it is that among the Nacirema, women with especially large breasts get paid to travel and display them. Nacirema was “American” spelled backwards—get it?—and the idea was to show how revealing, and even peculiar, our society is if described from a clinical distance.
These days, there is something else about the Nacirema—they have developed a new religion. That religion is antiracism. Of course, most consider antiracism a position, or evidence of morality. However, in 2015, among educated Americans especially, Antiracism—it seriously merits capitalization at this point—is now what any naïve, unbiased anthropologist would describe as a new and increasingly dominant religion. It is what we worship, as sincerely and fervently as many worship God and Jesus and, among most Blue State Americans, more so.
More:
Antiracism as religion has its downsides. It encourages an idea that racism in its various guises must be behind anything bad for black people, which is massively oversimplified in 2015. For example, it is thrilling to see the fierce, relentless patrolling, assisted by social media, that the young black activists covered in a recent New York Times Magazine piece have been doing to call attention to cops’ abuse of black people. That problem is real and must be fixed, as I have written about frequently, often to the irritation of the Right. However, imagine if there were a squadron of young black people just as bright, angry and relentless devoted to smoking out the bad apples in poor black neighborhoods once and for all, in alliance with the police forces often dedicated to exactly that? I fear we’ll never see it—Antiracism creed forces attention to the rogue cops regardless of whether they are the main problem.
The efforts in recent days by corporate and entertainment elites to affirm their Antiracism piety are something to behold. I have been receiving from you readers copies of e-mails that CEOs and university presidents have been sending out in the last day or two. They are, in the Nacireman sense, religious testimonials.
Snip.
The more totalitarian a regime’s nature, the more it will try to force people to forget their cultural memories. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the role of Winston Smith within the Ministry of Information is to erase all newspaper records of past events to reflect the current political priorities of the Party. This, said the ex-communist Polish intellectual Leszek Kołakowski, reflects “the great ambition of totalitarianism—the total possession and control of human memory.”
“Let us consider what happens when the ideal has been effectively achieved,” says Kołakowski. “People remember only what they are taught to remember today and the content of their memory changes overnight, if needed.”
You think voting for Donald Trump, or voting Republican, is going to stop this? You’re dreaming. Don’t misread me: it may be important to vote for conservatives over liberals; in fact, in most cases, it certainly is. But this is not something that can be countered through politics. No Republican politician will do anything, or be able to do anything, about corporate leaders subjecting employees to re-education sessions, or universities doubling down on social justice indoctrination. We are going to come out of this long, hot, miserable summer with the progressive ruling class with much more confidence in its own righteousness, and much more willing to clamp down on dissent from its “social justice” gospel.
And what did all this rioting, looting and arson achieve? President Donald Trump’s approval among likely black voters is now up to 41%.
Great work, Social Justice Warriors!
There seem to be two broad categories among the Social Justice Warriors: The true believers (including indoctrinated college students who don’t know any better, staffers at elite newspapers and universities, etc.), and the cynical manipulators who see it as a means to power.
The first goal of social justice is to force groupthink and obedience to the dictates of the victimhood identity politics left. To control the country, the hard left must first control the Democratic Party. The goal of controlling the Party is far more immediate and important to them than winning elections for “moderate” Democrats. Indeed, cowing opposition to SJW doctrine is far more important than the actual lives of black people, which is why rioters didn’t hesitate to destroy the livelihoods of black store owners.
Police make the perfect scapegoats for the ills of society, but are mainly targeted by activists because they’re an obstacle to the hard left achieving total control at the local level. This is why they push to have the police abolished or effective leaders replaced with weak candidates that will hew to the Social Justice Warrior line.
Social Justice Warriors must be resisted at every turn.
Congratulations on surviving a week of Antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioting. The riots themselves seem to have mostly petered out, but it looks like the federal prosecutions are just getting started. But we interrupt our regularly scheduled riot ruminations to bring a deeply unexpected bit of good news:
The U.S. economy added 2.5 million jobs in May. “Unexpectedly!” as job gains under Republican Presidents (and job losses under Democratic ones) always seem to be. We still have a huge self-inflicted hole to climb out out, but these numbers suggest that not only are we in a V-shaped recession, we’re already on the other side of the V.
To set the reality in which Antifa plans to prosecute the Democrats’ promised “revolution,” it needs to attack all the pillars of society. Throughout the country, they burned post offices, police precincts, banks, gas stations. city halls, and courts — they hit the CNN Center, and now churches.
Barack Obama started the “fundamental transformation of the United States of America.” Yet, this is not Obama’s Antifa. A failure as president, he did manage to accomplish one important prerequisite for this rebellion. He instilled in the left the understanding that “change” must be forced upon an unwilling electorate.
With this insight, Antifa has transitioned from pajama-boy blobs of perpetually offended miscreants, mostly drawn from misanthropes who were picked last in high school, into a trained guerilla force with cool uniforms. Fascists like cool uniforms.
Antifa, the paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party, has spent the last three years recruiting, and organizing. They have mobilized and learned tactics. They have a plan and are working hard to cover all the bases. Starting slow, they probed to find what government would allow, media would trumpet, and the public would endure.
When they burned the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis, they knew they could get away with anything.
And, as we have seen, they can adapt. This was evident Monday night in New York City. Instead of massing together in one place to confront police, they executed lightning-fast blitzkrieg attacks in small groups. Hitting commercial properties, they ripped down plywood and broke windows. They didn’t loot or dilly dally, they moved quickly to the next target before police could respond.
This “hit and run” tactic is perfect for their organization because spreading the destruction over larger areas negates the numerical advantage of police and national guard. They will surely take this nationwide — it is what guerillas do.
Savagery is spreading with lightning speed across the United States, with murderous assaults on police officers and civilians and the ecstatic annihilation of businesses and symbols of the state. Welcome to a real civilization-destroying pandemic, one that makes the recent saccharine exhortations to “stay safe” and the deployment of police officers to enforce outdoor mask-wearing seem like decadent bagatelles.
This particular form of viral chaos was inevitable, given the failure of Minneapolis’s leaders to quell the city’s growing mayhem. The violence began on Tuesday, May 26, the day after the horrifying arrest and subsequent death of George Floyd. On the night of Thursday, May 28, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey ordered the city’s Third Police Precinct evacuated as the forces of hatred, distinct from legitimate forms of protest, descended upon it for a third day in a row. The building was promptly torched, sending a powerful sign that society would not defend its most fundamental institutions of law and order.
Snip.
The great philosophers and poets of the West—from Aeschylus and Euripides, to Shakespeare, Hobbes, and the American Founders—understood the chaos and lust for power that lurk beneath civilization. Thanks to the magnificent infrastructure of the rule of law, we now take stability and social trust for granted. We assume that violence, once unleashed in the name of justice, can easily be put back in the bottle.
It cannot.
It was a signal accomplishment of both politics and science to banish humanity’s millennia-long fear of darkness. That city dwellers are now reexperiencing that fear with each fall of night is a measure of how rapidly we are losing our hard-won progress.
The Democrats chose to support Black Lives Matter and to coddle Antifa. Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison had previously posed with a copy of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, touting it as “the book that strike fear in the heart of” Trump. Now Ellison has been tweeting conspiracy theories that blame the riots on “white supremecists”. But, the only white supremacists on the scene are Democrats.
Minneapolis’ last Republican mayor stepped down in 1974. While his city burned, Mayor Jacob Frey, a Biden supporter, attacked President Trump, whining, “weakness is refusing to take responsibility for your own actions, weakness is pointing your finger at someone else in a time of crisis.”
That’s exactly what Frey and the Democrats have been doing in the face of the riots. Frey, a former community organizer, had repeatedly tweeted support for the Black Lives Matter racist hate group that is carrying out much of the violence. Instead of taking responsibility, Frey is blaming President Trump.
Chief Medaria Arradondo was handpicked by Frey’s predecessor as the city’s African-American police boss after the shooting of Justine Damond, an Australian woman reporting a crime, by Mohammed Noor, a Somali Muslim officer. Arradondo replaced Janee Harteau, the first female chief of the force.
Arradondo, like Harteau, came into office promising transformational change. He had already sued the city for racial discrimination, winning a huge settlement, and had all the right buzzwords about diversity and equity.
“I’m committed to making sure that when the history is written, we are on the right side of history,” he declared at his first press conference, echoing Obama.
That’s the police force on whose watch the Floyd riots began.
This national nightmare came out of a deeply progressive city, under the administration of progressives, and happened under elected Democrat officials who embodied the progressive vision for America.
George Floyd and the resulting riots are entirely the work of their hands.
“Jeremiah Ellison, the son of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minneapolis city council member, wants to ‘dismantle the Minneapolis police department.'” It’s like they want Minnesota to flip to Trump in November. And remember how close Keith Ellison came to becoming DNC chair in 2017…
Other Democrats are showing the knee-jerk anti-police mentality, with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti cutting $150 million from the LAPD budget to redirect it to race hustling poverty pimps and payoffs to connected black Democrats “communities of color.”
Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director Steve McGraw told the press on Tuesday that Antifa was responsible for the Sunday evening looting of the Capital Plaza Target in Austin.
McGraw also confirmed that the department has agents embedded in Antifa, from which they received the intel.
He said, “[The looting] was done and organized by an Antifa webpage, and of course, the surveillance that was provided over the internet to identify where law enforcement resources were staged was done over Antifa accounts.”
Antifa is a militant left-wing movement dedicated to fighting what it qualifies as fascism, and white supremacy, in America by any means — physically violent, verbally vitriolic, or otherwise — it deems necessary. Tracing its heritage to the German antifaschistischs in the 20th century, it engages in similar street-fight tactics that frequented the Weimar Republic.
This 21st-century version sprung up after the 2016 election and is known for sucker-punching and assaulting those whom they oppose, setting fire to buildings, and inciting riots. They have a reach that extends far beyond the United States, across continents.
I note that Antifa, being the racists they are, looted the Target closest to the poor, still-black part of East Austin. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)
Local pharmacy broken into Sat night. Smashed side door. Proprietor says every pharmacy in Bev Hills was broken into between 8PM and 11PM. Sounds well-organized. "What were they after?" "Drugs and money."
Chuck DeVore, who as a captain in the California Army National Guard helped put down the 1992 LA riots, covers historicla uses of the Insurrection Act, and whether invoking it is a good idea.
Jose Nino provides an overview of China’s Communist Party oppressing their own people. Caveats: He fails to mention the brutal subjugation of Tibet, and I think his death toll estimates on starvation deaths from The Great leap Forward are somewhat on the low side.
“As expected DOJ has filed a motion with the DC Court of Appeals SUPPORTING @GenFlynn’s writ of mandamus. Slightly unexpected is how much Team Sullivan & Collusion HQ get absolutely REKT.”
“The NYT has changed, become a social justice paper instead of a Left-wing paper with some social justice op-eds. Wokeness infuses it all.”
Nature wants to kill you:
Important public service announcement: Being a cybercriminal is really, really boring.
Last woman receiving a Civil War era pension dies. Her father, who fought for the Confederacy before switching to the Union side in 1863, married when he was 83.
It should be obvious to any observer that the Antifa riots across the country were obviously coordinated with #BlackLivesMatter marches. Both groups are funded by George Soros. Just as he spent millions to spur the Ferguson riots on, people in both Antifa and #BlackLivesMatters are obviously coordinating their nationwide attacks.
Ace of Spades points out another prong of the George Soros-funded attack: Electing radical DAs willing to ignore the law and release rioters back on the streets without charging them:
George Soros realized that it was very expensive and very hard to attempt to support so many leftwing legislators that they could change the law to make crime, well, not a crime.
So he settled on a new strategy. One that worked. He put a huge amount of money into the campaigns of leftwing, pro-crime prosecutors and attorney generals.
He wouldn’t bother to get laws changed — too difficult! No legislator wants to face a campaign ad against him pointing out, accurately, that he voted to decriminalize crime.
No, he’d just bankroll dozens (hundreds?) of leftwing DAs and AGs to ignore the laws entirely, claiming that prosecutorial discretion gives the absolute power to simply declare that The Law Is No Longer The Law.
Like I said: It worked.
St. Louis’ Kim Gardner is one of George Soros’ success stories.
She accepted several hundred thousand dollars in in-kind donations in the form of positive campaign ads in her favor — to allow her to beat other moderate Democrats who were not pro-criminal in the primary — which were paid for by Stalinesquely named “Safety & Justice Committee,” which is devoted to releasing hardened dangerous criminals from jail to kill citizens.
This committee is funded by George Soros.
Who also funded the Ferguson rioters.
Now Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt says that Gardner is refusing to charge rioters:
In a stunning development, our office has learned that every single one of the St. Louis looters and rioters arrested were released back onto the streets by local prosecutor Kim Gardner. pic.twitter.com/tMZVAyHssw
Schmitt, a Republican, also says rioters in his state could catch federal charges:
Today we announced an unprecedented partnership between my office & federal prosecutors to send a message loud & clear: If you come to Missouri to cause destruction, loot or riot we will prosecute you. We won’t allow you to terrorize our communities. First arrests announced 👇 pic.twitter.com/3dXBM6pY0y
At least one big-city mayor is now calling on the federal government to investigate what appears to be an “organized” effort to foment unrest and engage in rioting, as security experts in other cities discover evidence that many of the weekend’s violent incidents may have been pre-planned and coordinated.
In Chicago, mayor Lori Lightfoot told media Sunday that she believes there is “strong evidence” of an organized effort to use the weekend’s anti-police brutality protests as a cover for violence, Crain’s Chicago Business reports, and said the city is speaking with at least three Federal agencies about a possible joint investigation.
Snip.
“There is no doubt. This was an organized effort last night,” Lightfoot said in a weekend press conference, referring to Friday’s unrest. “There were clearly efforts to subvert the peaceful process and make it into something violent.”
Minneapolis and urban centers across America are burning, most directly in response to the brutal killing of a black man by a white Minnesota police officer. But the rage ignited by the death of George Floyd is symptomatic of a profound sense of alienation that has been building for years among millions of poor, working class urbanites. The already diminished prospects facing such people have only been worsened by the unforeseen onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic and the policies devised to combat it.
Like earlier pandemics, the virus has devastated poorer communities, where people live in the most crowded housing, are forced to travel on public transport, and work in the most exposed “essential” jobs, most of which are badly paid. Unlike the affluent of Gotham, some 30 percent of whom were able to leave town and work remotely, the working class remained, forced to endure crowded conditions as the disease raged through the city. No surprise then that inhabitants of the impoverished Bronx have suffered nearly twice as many deaths from COVID-19 as those in the more affluent, but denser borough of Manhattan.
This pattern can be observed globally. In Spain, the bulk of infections and reduced incomes are concentrated in poorer areas. Similar disparities can be found in countries as varied as China, Japan, France, and Italy. Even in egalitarian Singapore, infections have risen precipitously among the country’s migrant workers—an underclass who tend to live in crowded dormitories. Similarly, in Los Angeles the poor have died from COVID-19 at four times the rate of the city’s overall population. In both New Orleans and Detroit, the vast majority of fatalities have been among disproportionately impoverished African Americans.
As if this were not already quite bad enough, we are now starting to see the economic consequences of the lockdowns. In the US, roughly half of all job losses in April were in low-paying fields such as restaurants, hotels, and amusement parks; in contrast information and finance jobs were barely touched. Almost 40 percent of those Americans making under $40,000 a year have lost their jobs as the wage gains made during the first two years of the Trump administration largely evaporated.
Snip.
Perhaps the most alarming development during these riots has been the urgent revival of what urban historian Fred Siegel calls “the riot ideology.” The roots of this thinking can be traced to the late-1960s when they were set down among progressive analysts who decided that violence and looting constituted a just response to abuses by law enforcement and other agents of oppression. This notion became painfully popular during the 1992 LA riots, which I covered as a journalist, when random looting and even killings were applauded by some radical activists as part of a glorious “rebellion” or uprising.
Today, two generations later, this ideology is staging a comeback. Progressive outlets like Vox scold anyone who refers to outbreaks of widespread mayhem and looting as “riots” preferring to describe them as righteous protests; Mother Jones says that anyone using the word “riot” to describe violent looters is intrinsically racist. Writers at the New York Times have even proposed “de-funding” police forces in favor of spreading more money to other government programs. Slate, for its part, endorsed the burning of the Minneapolis police station as “a reasonable reaction” to George Floyd’s death, and suggested that such wanton destruction is a “quintessentially American response, and a predictable one” comparable to the Boston Tea Party and Stonewall.
National Democratic leaders, including presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden, have been strangely reluctant to denounce the violence, while correctly criticizing President Trump for his needlessly inflammatory tweets. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has quoted Martin Luther King’s remark that “a riot is the language of the unheard” and stripped it of its original context to decorate the current violence with the romanticism of justice. Radical Minneapolis firebrand Rep. Ilhan Omar has suggested that her constituents are “terrorized” by the presence of the police and National Guard.
Deep blue Mayors like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a 38-year-old progressive focused heavily on racial injustice, cede the streets to the most violent elements, even abandoning a police station that was set alight—a response former St. Paul Mayor and Senator Norm Coleman called “stunning.” Rather than contain demonstrations, some cities initially conceded critical urban space to the rioters to the point of threatening prime central city real estate. In Chicago, city officials, much like their Medieval counterparts, raised the bridges over the Chicago River to keep the protestors out of affluent parts of the central city.
Remarkably, these mayors seem to be largely indifferent to the rise of largely white, anarchist groups, like Antifa, who can be seen in videos committing acts of vandalism and violence, even over the objections of African American protestors.
— Big League Politics (@bigleaguepol) June 2, 2020
Enough is enough:
These riots stopped being about #GeorgeFloyd a long time ago. Enough is enough. I’m fed up watching us destroy ourselves. It’s time for me to speak. pic.twitter.com/gWAa15tGd8
Antifa is a despicable group whose sole mission is to terrorize this country and its citizens. It deserves to be categorized – and punished – accordingly.
As Antifa showed this weekend, it is a domestic terrorist organization. Period.
— Senator Kelly Loeffler (@SenatorLoeffler) June 1, 2020
This one is everywhere:
Valuable life lesson: a mob is never on your side.
More Ukraine news, China and Iran compete to see who can buy a bigger piece of Slow Joe, Biden’s staff bail out antifa rioters, and he confuses D-Day and Pearl Harbor. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
“Ukrainian MP Andriy Derkach on May 19 made public leaked audio recordings of phone conversations held by former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State John Kerry with ex-President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko.
“At a press event held in Kyiv on Tuesday, Derkach said U.S. officials asked that Petro Poroshenko ensure the dismissal of the-then Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
“One of the conversations on the said issues was allegedly recorded on December 3, 2015, where the voice that’s purportedly John Kerry’s is heard saying: ‘I just wanted to try to urge you to see if there’s a way to get by this problem of replacing the prosecutor general, you know, [Viktor] Shokin because per my perception, he’s blocked the cleanup of the Prosecutor General’s Office,’ said Kerry.”
There’s another recording from March 22, 2016, in which Derkach claims the voices of Biden and Poroshenko are heard again. In it, Biden reiterates his quid pro quod demand for change in the prosecutor general’s office and “the government” (unspecified) in return for $1 billion.
Not surprisingly, Derkach is being accused of being everything from a KGB agent to a Trump shill, but it should be fairly easy to authenticate those voices. Just don’t look for The New York Times to do it.
Meanwhile, also on May 20, the Senate Homeland Security Committee and its chair Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) have finally subpoenaed Blue Star Strategies, a Democrat-leaning Washington firm that was doing public relations for Burisma, attempting to burnish its tarnished image. Blue Star’s CEO denies any wrong-doing but for reasons unknown had refused to turn over documents to the committee for months.
Anyway, it’s certain that Biden’s “Ukraine problem” isn’t going to go away. Ditto his China problem, which also involves Hunter.
Many claims were made that Trump would be in Putin’s pocket were he elected U.S. president. The reality is, for similar reasons with considerably more actual evidence, electing Biden would be far more dangerous to our country.
Iranian state-sponsored hackers are looking to interfere in the 2020 U.S. elections in November, say senior U.S. intelligence officials.
“Iran seeks to undermine U.S. democratic institutions, the current U.S. president, and to divide the country in advance of the 2020 elections,” one official told Just The News.
In addition to hacking the election, the Iranians are looking to sow discord about the pandemic. “Iran is targeting U.S. and international health organizations for COVID-19 information” and selectively release information that would stoke divisions, the official said. This seems unnecessary when the liberal media is already doing that.
Iran is also targeting U.S. electric utilities, and oil and gas companies.
“It’s fairly well known that the Iranian government has invested considerable resources into cyber hacking, and have done so for some time,” said Fred Fleitz, former NSC chief of staff and CIA analyst.
As for their goals in hacking the U.S. elections, can you guess who they want to win?
“Iran’s attempt to interfere in U.S. elections must be analyzed in the context of its deep trouble domestically,” Ramesh Sepehrrad, a cybersecurity executive, explained to Just The News. “With three rounds of major nationwide uprisings calling for regime change, widespread corruption added to the public’s anger, and mismanagement, the cash-hungry regime is extremely vulnerable.”
According to Sepehrrad, the mullahs believe a change in leadership in the United States will benefit them. “Tehran’s strategy is to buy time and survive until November, hoping that a potentially Democratic U.S. President would save them,” she said. “Therefore, given their absolute desperation to survive domestic unrest, economic disaster, and U.S. pressure, Trump’s reelection is a nightmare for the ayatollahs.”
What do you want to bet that our beloved news media suddenly won’t treat election interference by a hostile foreign power as The Worst Thing Ever anymore? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Speaking of foreign powers with a Piece of Joe, The Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania accused of taking “over $70 million from China, of which $22 million were listed as ‘Anonymous.'”
It’s pretty clear who the commie bastards known for their shoddy lab practices and their weird fetish for gnawing on pangolins badly want to win in November, and it’s not Trump and the Republicans. The Chinese communists want their money’s worth, and they will go all-in for the Democrats who find the chance to hurt Trump at the same time they hurt America too delicious to pass up. Plus, the Dems heartily approve of what Mao’s Pals are doing to freedom-loving Hong Kongers, seeing it as a template for what they would love to do to freedom-loving us.
We need to understand and accept that a vote for anyone with a “D” is a vote for Xi.
Snip.
Let’s look at Joe Biden for a moment, though it will have to be on video since the Geppettos holding his strings are not letting him out of his Delaware dungeon unless a miracle happens and he becomes a real boy.
This is the guy that went publicly incontinent when the Great Wall Gang was shipping Typhoid Mulans over here and Trump cut off that insanity. Travel bans were racist, you know, until they weren’t. And this guy wants to be president, when he remembers he is running for president, though his priority was not saving American lives but not vexing Beijing. This guy is so far in the Red Menace’s pocket that he’s risking lint poisoning.
They channel the digital Dem, asking, “Come on man, is it too much to want a president who takes America’s side?
Well, to the Democrats, the answer is a responding, “Yes, and don’t assume my gender.”
Now, Biden always sides with the PRC because, like the elite whose Guccis he slurps, he’s totally comfortable with the Chinese supplanting the USA as the world’s preeminent nation – that’ll show those flag-waving flyover rubes who’s not boss! The totally-not-senile politician opposed Trump’s tariffs and his attempts to level the playing field, and Hi-Bidder Biden would sign agreements to lock in the former Deliverance trade model. His response to the People’s Liberation Army arms build-up that threatens our Pacific Fleet would be, “Hey man, I believe in building-up arms! I work out and I am strong and I can do more push-ups than you, fat!”
Here’s the other thing. Remember all that idiotic babble about the Russki kompromat of Trump? That somewhere, Putin had this video library of Trump water-sporting with Muscovite rent girls? Well, we all know Joe’s pride n’ joy Hoover went to China and did a big-bucks deal, probably because he’s such a super-achiever who got where he is on his own talents and not at all drafting after his daddy. So, what else do you think he did when he was there? Explored the Great Wall? Marveled at the Forbidden City? Cavorted with every skeeze the ChiCom intel guys could throuple him up with on video?
Did it happen? You want to bet it didn’t? We know the guy got booted from the Navy for dope. We know he got zillions from some Ukrainian oligarch. We know he was accused of forgetting his crack pipe in a rental car. We know he impregnated a stripper. We know he was voted “Least Likely to be the Centerfold of Good Judgment Monthly.”
What are the chances the Chinese Gestapo didn’t try to honey-trap the guy who’s the Winnie the Pooh of hookers n’ blow? What do you think they probably caught him doing on Candid Commie Camera? It’d be like a home movie from Memorial Day weekend in Lake Havasu on Bob Crane’s houseboat.
That Biden is the Democrats’ presumptive nominee is truly remarkable when you think about it. He’s all but abandoned his native tongue. He had one mediocre debate performance while the rest ranged from awful to disastrous. He’s off-script more than Robin Williams during his peak cocaine years on Mork and Mindy, yet everyone over on that side keeps giving him a pass.
As many have noted, this pandemic shutdown has been a boon for Biden and is probably the reason he’s doing well in the polls. Time away from the public eye has been Biden’s friend, train wreck video appearances notwithstanding.
My latest “Democrats want the shutdown to continue” theory doesn’t have to do with tanking the economy, which I still believe is their primary objective. I believe their secondary objective is to leave as little time as possible between the return of the candidates to the campaign trail and the election. Biden is barely able to navigate the tightly scripted affairs that his handlers have him doing from his basement, they’re petrified of the thought of him being out in the wild, off-leash and babbling.
So, the longer Democratic governors can keep things at least in partial shutdown, the more the economy tanks and hurts Trump and the more reason Team Biden has to keep their guy away from cameras where he might eat a booger or sniff a stranger.
I’ll admit, this is the first presidential election since 1984 where I was looking forward to the general election debates. The thought of seeing Trump’s extemporaneous wizardry going head-to-head with Biden’s word salad factory will probably come off as something more akin to British comedy than American political theater. Must-see TV for sure.
There is little doubt that Biden’s biggest gaffe is just waiting for his grand return to campaigning in public. You know it, I know it, and his handlers all have bleeding ulcers because they know it better than anyone. Once he is back out in public, Joe Biden becomes the greatest weapon against Joe Biden. President Trump could go on autopilot and win the election.
Wow, it was awfully convenient that antifa launched their riot spree right after Biden made his “You ain’t black” comment, wasn’t it?
Any questions about the Mueller Investigations impartiality?
This is the prosecutor who also attended Hillary Clinton's tear-filled election night event in 2016. Doing his best to discredit the investigation. https://t.co/xMbn9LnzY5
On the other hand, the Harris reputation for being “top cop” may rule her out.
And the riots may spell doom for Amy Klobuchar’s campaign as well, given that she declined to prosecute Derek Chauvin or other police who had complaints against them.
The Biden campaign makes some more hires. “Mr. Biden’s campaign is designating Addisu Demissie, a veteran Democratic strategist who managed Senator Cory Booker’s presidential campaign, as a senior adviser responsible for coordinating the convention. It is also naming Lindsay Holst, who was Mr. Biden’s digital director when he was vice president, to lead special projects for the convention, including its digital side, according to people familiar with the appointments.”
“Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden confused D-Day and Pearl Harbor—as well as the date that Delaware declared its independence from neighboring Pennsylvania—at a Wednesday campaign event. ‘We declared our independence on December the 7th. It’s not just D-Day.'” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit, who notes “Was it over when the Germans landed at Pearl Harbor?”)
I will consider your candidacy if you explain the science behind your opinion that a biological man can be a woman, and your party's position that a baby in the ninth month of pregnancy is a mere cluster of cells. https://t.co/gayelXptRA
Patrick Underwood, the federal protective officer killed in Oakland, was black. So, just as in the 1960s, we have black law enforcement officials being killed by white radicals.
The playbook has been the same one they ran in Fergeson: use the cover of black protestors to bring far-left agitators out to sow disorder and chaos through rioting, looting and arson, while the response to the disorder in (mostly) Democratic Party run locales is ineffectual. That playbook appeared to be aimed at radicalizing black voters so they continued to show up at polls for Democrats without Obama at the top of the ticket. Not only did it fail to do that, the actual voting results seemed counterproductive; Romney won Missouri by about 250,000 votes in 2012, but Trump won it by over 500,000 votes in 2016. Given that, why are George Soros and other financial backers of Antifa and #BlackLivesMatter running the same playbook again in multiple communities around the country?
Here are some possible answers, come complimentary, some contradictory.
With lockdowns ending across so much of the nation, never again would so many people be idle and/or unemployed all at once. Never again would antifa have a chance to wreck so much havoc on so wide a scale. It was now or never.
The radical left always thinks it’s more popular than it actually is, and it actually thought it could topple the U.S. government with violent insurrection.
At its core, BLM is a revolutionary Marxist ideology. Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, BLM’s founders, are self-identified Marxists who make no secret of their worship of communist terrorists and fugitives, like Assata Shakur. They want the abolishment of law enforcement and capitalism. They want regime change and the end of the rule of law. Antifa have partnered with them, for now, to help accelerate the break down of society.
The US is getting a small preview of the anarchy antifa has been agitating, training and preparing for. Ending law enforcement is a pre-condition for antifa and BLM’s success in monopolizing violence. Those who are harmed first are the weak and vulnerable, the people who cannot protect themselves. Small business owners in Minnesota pleaded for mercy, even putting up signs and messages in support of the rioters, but to no avail.
The destruction of businesses we’re witnessing across the US is not mere opportunism by looters. It plays a critical role in antifa and BLM ideology. Their stated goal is to abolish capitalism. To do that, they have to make economic recovery impossible. Antifa sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to exploit an economically weakened America during the coronavirus pandemic.
The old communist adage that “Reform is the enemy of revolution.” With the pre-cornoavirus economy going gangbusters, the hard left had to do something radical to prevent prosperity from spreading among the black community. So when they torch a bar that a black firefighter built with his life savings, that’s not a lamentable side effect, that’s a direct desired result to punish him for participating in capitalism.
What the left really wants is a chance to insert direct Social Justice Warrior control into the nation’s police departments.
Maybe it was a lure to bait police into overreacting to create another round of martyrs to further radicalize blacks.
The Wuhan coronavirus lockdown wasn’t moving Trump’s poll numbers at all, so more drastic actions were needed.
The aftermath of ObamaGate is going to be bad for the Democratic Party, and they needed a distraction.
“Never let a crisis go to waste.” Maybe they saw it as a chance to transfer more power and control to government now that it’s lockdown powers were dwindling.
Here’s a radical thought: What if the backers and antifa and #BlackLivesMatter want Trump to win? The insane wing couldn’t get Bernie Sanders the nomination, and they can’t control the Democratic Party if Biden wins and leaves the Clinton hacks in charge of the gravy train for the next 4-8 years. As in the 1960s, looting and rioting boost the chances of law and order candidates, which is clearly Donald Trump this year. They need Trump to win again to completely take over the Party for the radical left.
Some random tweets about the rioting:
If only there were some simple way to avoid such a fate.
But watch out if more than 50 people show up at a church this morning. Madison officials are threatening action against the churches. Sad. Now, more than ever, people need to gather together to worship and heal. https://t.co/0RD5anhsJG
Fed LE is not under the control of leftist DAs, police chiefs & mayors. For too long you had Democrat cities pulling back police & releasing rioters immediately w/o serious charges.
By reviewing arrest records, the FBI can determine potential candidates for federal charges. 2/
When the first of these little trust fund sissies figures out he’s not walking out of his cell after 20 minutes with a $50 fine but looking at five years in Leavenworth on a Fed rap, he’ll squeal on his comrades. 4/
This is an opportunity to destroy Antifa root and branch, and to eliminate the armed wing of the Democrat party. Forever
They miscalculated and overstepped – America is absolutely against them and this is the time for @realDonaldTrump to strike a fatal blow against them. 5/
I sure telling ordinary Americans that they "don't get to complain about looting" is a surefire vote winner for November. #BlackLivesMatter and #antifa have done more to ensure Trump's reelection than anyone else.
