This has been a long time coming. At least a generation, maybe two. The left methodically has taken control of key institutions to implement an anti-American, anti-Capitalist agenda.
You send your kids to public schools and college, where they are taught from their earliest years that America and capitalism are the sources of evil in the world, that we are a systemically racist society that consumes ‘black and brown bodies,’ while socialist and communist systems are more equal and fair. It’s all a lie, but it’s a lie told by the teachers, professors, and administrators with power. The real racists are the people who obsess about race, and who judge people based on the color of their skin.
When your kids emerge from the social justice warfare meat grinder, you don’t recognize them anymore. Oh well, you shrug.
There is a concerted effort funded by leftist billionaires and high tech companies to control what you can say, and to silence you through mob action or social media throttling if you get out of line. The large corporate media, with only a couple of exceptions, is thoroughly corrupt and works every day to elect their preferred candidates, always Democrats.
The law enforcement system is being undermined by district attorneys funded by George Soros whose agenda is to prevent enforcement of laws, and politicians whose goal is to see those arrested released immediately without bail. We’re seeing that right now with rioters and looters almost immediately released. The next push is to defund the police.
Hollywood, The music industry. Television. Gone.
We still have the vote and can win elections, despite the disadvantage. But it’s not a guarantee. Which is why the left wants to subvert voting integrity.
All this time, you have seen bits and pieces, and figured that while you might not agree, it wasn’t a threat to our existence.
The wilding and looting should be your wake up call. When seconds counted, the police were pulled back by the policitians.
Reminder: The #BlackLivesMatter chant “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” is founded on a lie.
Let us know Biden and his party by what they have done for black people in all the decades Dems have enjoyed a firm hold on their vote.
If they really cared about black lives, they would have tried to address the real reasons for black disadvantage. They would worry about fatherlessness, the 70 percent of black children born to single mothers, the illiteracy that holds down black achievement, and drugs that blight black lives.
They would champion school choice, which Attorney General Bill Barr calls the “civil rights issue of our era.”
They would wonder why black disadvantage and violence is entrenched in cities they have controlled for decades.
But instead, Democrats blather about “systemic racism” and blame cops and President Trump.
Texas hit a new daily high in COVID-19 cases Tuesday with 2,504 new cases reported, according to data released Wednesday by the Texas Department of State Health Services. That topped the previous daily high of 1,949 cases May 31.
Just over 21% of the new cases were reported in Jefferson County, which reported 537 new cases Tuesday, nearly doubling its previous total.
Asked about the cause of the increase, DSHS spokesperson Chris Van Deusen pointed to Jefferson County’s three state prison units.
Most of the new cases were “due to a change in how the local health department is reporting” cases from the prisons, he said.
Hot spots like prisons have recently started to do mass testing, and the data is not always reported daily.
To the growing list of opinions that could cause you to be cast out of public life we can now add: thinking white privilege is a bullshit idea and thinking that staging a protest in Wales against police brutality in Minneapolis is a bit stupid.
For over the past 24 hours it has been revealed that two British men have been sacked and suspended respectively for the crime of gently criticising the tactics and rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Stu Peters, a presenter on the Isle of Man’s Manx Radio station, has been suspended and put under investigation following an on-air clash with a black caller. In the exchange, Peters criticised the concept of white privilege (‘I’ve had no more privilege in my life than you have’) and questioned the point of BLM protests on the Isle (‘You can demonstrate anywhere you like, but it doesn’t make any sense to me’). The case has even been referred to the Isle of Man’s Communications Commission.
We just had the biggest spike of new gun buyers in recorded history — and then did it again one month later
The NSSF (the gun industry’s main trade group) just released their report on gun sales in the first four months of 2020. Record-breaking spikes in guns sales actually happen relatively frequently, and that’s certainly been the case in 2020. But the unique thing this year is how many of those gun sales were to first-time owners. The NSSF estimates that 40 percent of sales were to newbies, two-thirds higher than the typical level of 24 percent. Combined with 6.5 million background checks in the first four months of the year, NSSF estimates that the January–April 2020 period created 2.6 million new gun owners in the US.
There are 209 million adults in the US. Thirty percent of them personally own a gun. So 2.6 million new gun owners means a 4.1 percent increase in the total number of gun owners. In four months, driven by COVID. That’s before the second wave of new buyers from all the May–June upheaval — which wave, judging by the images of 2-hour lines outside gun shops, could be just as big as the first one.
Much bigger, I would guess, if demand can keep up.
West Palm Beach Mayor Keith James announced a ban on gun and ammunition sales. So Democrats not only want to encourage rioters, refuse to prosecute them, and defund the police, they want to take away the means to defend yourself as well…
Know whose views the media wants to supress? Yours:
The left is seeking to define the scope of acceptable thought, and they do it by marginalizing the mainstream and mainstreaming the marginal.
They do it by lying both directly and by omission of normal views the leftists disapprove of. I talk about it in detail (and brutally) in my new non-fiction book The 21 Biggest Lies About Donald Trump (and You!). Even as my tome prepares to drop on 7/7, new examples of this crap keep popping up.
Look at the “defund the police” idiocy. This sinister power grab – it’s not crazy, but rather a calculated effort to centralize force within left-wing power structures and leave you disarmed and defenseless – gets the support of only a rounding error of American citizens, but it’s the only view you hear on the commie cable shows. Some try to gaslight it so not to freak out the whiny white wine women of suburbia who know their Ken-doll feminized and gunless husbands won’t be able to protect them. The sugar coaters assert that only a stupid conservative dummy would think “defund the police” actually means “defund the police,” just like “believe all women” could never be reasonably interpreted as meaning that people should “believe all women.”
For more privileged individuals such as [Catherine] Tait, as Glenn Loury told the Quillette podcast recently, the anti-racism movement is now more akin to a performative religion, presenting garment-rending adherents with concepts analogous to original sin (whiteness) and excommunication (cancelation). America and its white inhabitants are presented as having permanently cursed souls, a defect that can be addressed only through elaborate rites of penance, as in recent scenes of white people washing the feet of black community leaders. And it’s notable that the above-described art-house and newsroom controversies always seem to originate in some supposedly sacrilegious text or monologue, whose heretical nature is taken as proof of a contaminated character.
Snip.
The reason the Times has lost its editorial moorings isn’t that social media is crazy and tribalistic. Social media has always been crazy and tribalistic. What’s changed is that the firewall between social media and real life has now broken down completely thanks to the pandemic lockdown. Since we’re all working from home, and dealing with co-workers only through digital means, the line between colleague and troll has blurred to nothingness.
It was one thing when Times staffers had to co-exist in a world of cubicles, water fountains, lunchrooms, and elevator chit chat. We all say we’re exasperated by office life, but the annoying rituals of communal work help remind us that our colleagues are actual human beings who tell stories about their dogs and put stick-it notes on their Tupperware. Canceling James Bennet, Real Human Being, would have been a lot harder than canceling @James_Bennet, the Slack-channel avatar. Certainly, it’s no coincidence that the Times’ descent into full-blown progressive cancel-culture social panic happened to coincide with the only period in the newspaper’s history when people who once rubbed elbows daily suddenly never saw each other for many months.
Speaking of the Times, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell is not impressed with their intestinal fortitude:
“One of our nation’s most storied newspapers just had its intellectual independence challenged by an angry mob, and they folded like a house of cards,” McConnell said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “A jury of people on Twitter indicted them as accessories to a thought crime, and instead of telling them to go take a hike, the paper pleaded guilty and begged for mercy.”
Important questions:
100 million dollar question that leftists are refusing to answer:
To what organization do the funds raised on the Black Lives Matter website go?
BLM raised 40 million dollars in 48 hours because of George Floyd’s death. But WHO did Act Blue direct that funding to?
Rioters in Philly deface a statue of Matthias Baldwin, an early abolitionist who fought against slavery 30 years before it ended. pic.twitter.com/1HKrDusPBh
President Donald Trump’s plan to pull troops from Germany irks Angela Merkel. Well duh. People hate it when you end their free ride.
President Donald Trump’s decision to cut the number of U.S. troops in Germany has irked Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government and German media.
The White House plans to withdraw 9,500 out of 35,000 U.S. troops stationed in Germany by September, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The move came after Germany ignored President Trump’s repeated warnings and kept defaulting on the agreed defense spending, leaving the U.S. to pick up the hefty NATO bill.
“The United States is spending far more on NATO than any other country. This is not fair, nor is it acceptable,” President Trump said at the 2018 NATO summit. The U.S. shoulders more than 70 percent of the NATO defense budget.
Peter Beyer, a German politician and a key Merkel ally, called the planned U.S. troop withdrawal “completely unacceptable” to Germany. “It’s not just about 9,500 soldiers, but also their families, an estimated 20,000 Americans,” he added.
What’s the last year Germany met it’s 2% funding target?
The Austin City Council, which turned the city into bumsville and wants to reduce funding for police by $100 million, wants to hike property taxes 25% to pay for a giant mass transportation boondoggle. Evidently the opportunities for graft there are far more extensive. The good news is that it requires voter approval, and I’m hoping that (for once) Austin voters will show a modicum of sanity.
Owner of Minneapolis manufacturing plant burned down by rioters has seen enough. “Kris Wyrobek thought he could rely on the city to protect his manufacturing business. In the wake of the city’s paralysis in the rioting — which the Star Tribune helpfully notes “sometimes overshadowed peaceful protests” — Wyrobek has had enough. He’s packing up his 7-Sigma plant to rebuild elsewhere after the city let it burn down, and he’s taking 50 jobs with him.”
Follow-up: Remember that “George Floyd and Derek Chauvin butted heads working at the same club” story? Yeah, not so much.
Wokeness comes for kid’s show Paw Patrol, which dares to feature a police dog as one of the characters.
Speaking of which, the Babylon Bee nails it again: “Paw Patrol Replaces Chase The Cop With Karl The Antifa Rioter.”
Related: “McGruff The Crime Dog Put Down.” You would not believe how long a I’ve been waiting to reuse the “McGruff the Crime Dog” tag…
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.
Senile Joe became Racist Joe this week, with one of the most amazingly ill-considered answers since Gerald R. Ford said Poland didn’t suffer from Soviet domination. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Warning: This week is going to be Twitter-heavy.
Let’s jump right into the controversy that may convince DNC insiders that they can’t afford to go into the general election with Biden as their candidate:
"If you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black."
— Lawrence B. Jones III (@LawrenceBJones3) May 22, 2020
Charlamagne tha God (AKA Lenard Larry McKelvey), the black radio host who interviewed Biden, did not find his apology compelling. “It has to come to the point where we stop putting the burden on black voters to show up for Democrats and start putting the burden on Democrats to show up for black voters.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
If you were born black, then you will die black. There is no such thing as being 'politically black'. This is nonsense designed to CONTROL you and keep you needy.
NOBODY can take away your ‘Blackness’. Your ‘Black Card’ is your birthright. Regardless of who you vote for. (12/14)
How is the media spinning Biden’s huge gaffe? Either the tried to gaslight us that it was a “joke” or says the real story is, as always, Republicans pounce.
Of course that’s not the only bad news to befall the Biden campaign this week. The Ukraine scandal continues to look worse and worse for Biden and his spawn:
Yikes!!!! This is not a “perfect conversation”
An audio recording of a conversation between Joe Biden and Petro Poroshenko on May 13, 2016 – YouTube https://t.co/7R2YxzDpGM
None of this necessarily means that Tara Reade’s story is true. But the evidence is fairly convincing that Reade’s story is not just a campaign-season invention.
One point in Reade’s favor, in contrast to Blasey Ford, is how she has handled her accusation. She made (as Young notes) a few edits to one of her blog posts to tailor it more closely with her current story, but unlike Blasey Ford, she did not delete her social-media history to erase all traces of political rants (even the embarrassing Putin stuff) before coming forward. She was not initially rolled out by a public-relations firm and a partisan lawyer (though she has since retained an attorney who is a Trump donor). She has not hidden behind her representatives to carefully stage-manage who could talk to her, and under what conditions; while she has canceled a few interviews and seems hesitant to appear on Fox News, she has sat for lengthy questioning on and off air by a diverse array of outlets ranging from left-wingers such as Halper, to ex-Fox personality Kelly, to the Times, Post, CNN, the Associated Press, Vox, and National Review. Maybe Reade is enjoying the publicity, but she is not hiding from questioners.
One columnist declared that former Vice President Joe Biden could boil babies and she would still vote for him. Feminist leaders have said they believe Biden raped a Senate staffer but they still endorse him. Good government advocates have opposed any investigation into prior sexual harassment or corruption claims against Biden. It seems politicians and pundits alike have discovered the glory of the “presidential bull.” In this instance, Biden is akin to a papal indulgence that allows writers, members of Congress and journalists to forgive any sin in a holy crusade to retake Washington.
In the 11th century, Pope Urban II formalized the use of indulgences, which could be purchased to forgive sins. A papal bull of the Crusade accompanied those who fought in the Holy Land and committed atrocities in the name of a higher order. The practice was defended as essentially drawing from the “treasury of merit” created by Jesus Christ, the saints and the faithful.
Now the 2020 election has become the ultimate crusade, and President Trump’s critics seem to be enjoying indulgences in tossing aside moral and ethical considerations. The freedom that is Biden is nowhere more evident than in a recent column by The Nation’s Katha Pollitt, who wrote about the allegations of sexual assault made by former Biden staffer Tara Reade. Pollitt dispensed with any struggle over feminist or moral qualms, declaring, “I would vote for Joe Biden if he boiled babies and ate them.”
As Pollitt explained, “We do not have the luxury of sitting out the election to feel morally pure or send a message about sexual assault and #BelieveWomen.” Otherwise, Pollitt would have to deal with her column during the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, in which she denounced “some of his defenders [who] seem to be saying that even if the allegations are true, it shouldn’t really matter.”
The most hilarious thing about Joe Biden's ongoing series of self-immolations is that all he has to do to win the presidency is what comes naturally: lying around being technically alive in a basement. And he can't.
But actually having won election as U.S. Senator, Klobuchar clearly has a more plausible case than Stacey Abrams:
Her attempt to leverage a failed Georgia gubernatorial bid into a spot on the Democratic ticket is so brazenly absurd that it’s hard to think of precedents.
But the 46-year-old African-American activist isn’t one to be constrained by standard political practice — or reality. She refused to concede her narrow but clear 2018 gubernatorial loss, instead alleging she’d been undone by a massive voter-suppression scheme.
As she put it at a recent event, “malfeasance and incompetence and my opponent, who was a cartoon villain, stole the voices of Georgians.” Usually, candidates who won’t acknowledge defeat are written off as sore losers. Such is the inflamed, paranoid state of Dems in the Trump era that rather than being embarrassed by the Georgian’s graceless and unsubstantiated claims of electoral theft, they have embraced and parroted them.
Abrams could be forgiven for thinking that if she could get her party to accept she is the rightful governor of Georgia, she has a chance to convince it that she deserves to be a heartbeat away from the presidency in the administration of a 78-year-old man.
By her own estimation, she’d be an “excellent running mate.” She has no doubt that she’s prepared to be president on Day One and touts her foreign-policy credentials of having visited more than a dozen countries.
President Trump has rewritten the rules of political experience, yet it’s still a stretch to imagine someone who has only served in the Georgia legislature — and as a state representative, not even a senator — is ready to become leader of the Free World. Even Pete Buttigieg has more executive experience.
Snip.
Abrams can reasonably boast of an ability to stoke turnout among minority and young voters — she won more votes than any state-wide candidate in Georgia ever. But given her high-octane progressivism, she’d have limited appeal to working-class swing voters and suburban women. By picking her, Biden would also be undermining one of his chief arguments, namely, that he’s a low-risk, experienced, steady hand.
This means that Abrams is likely to be passed over — and, if the past is any guide, conclude that she got robbed.
Welcome to a Friday LinkSwarm! There are five Saturdays in February this month, something that won’t happen again until 2048.
Giant water main break in Houston shuts down lots of schools and streets. The pipe, which is 8 feet across and supplies 40-50% of Houston’s water, burst during repairs. There’s a boil notice in effect for Houston for the next 24 hours. (Hat tip: Kemberlee Kaye.)
Why we need to secure the border to fight coronavirus: “U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended 1,155 Chinese migrants this fiscal year after they illegally entered from Mexico, Canada, or coastal boundaries. More than 95 percent came over the southwestern border between October 1, 2019, and January 31, 2020.”
Woke Rule No. 1 is that anything with “Principles” in its name is a grift. Now, something called “Principles First” – ugh – is trying to shoehorn into CPAC’s spotlight with its “National Summit on Principled Conservatism” to be held in D.C. on February 29th, and for the low, low, almost certainly lib tech tycoon-subsidized price of $10, you can attend this sexless Never Trump Freaknik.
It’s an opportunity to get one-on-one with all your favorite relevancy-challenged B-list MSNBCNN guests for a full day of complaining about Donald Trump and having them show you on the doll exactly where Trump hurt them. Brace yourselves for impassioned pleas by impotent weirdos to vote for the crusty commie curmudgeon because Trump sends mean tweets, plus plenty of “Oh well I nevers” and “We’re better than thats” as Pearl Clutchfest 2020 gets well and truly lit. Just don’t be surprised if the marquee outside reads “Puppet Show and Never Trump.”
From political consultants who are no longer consulted to writers who are no longer read, this is the Woodstock for conservatives who never actually conserved anything.
Excited? Worried you might miss out? Calm down. There are plenty of tickets left. And I hear they’ve got loads of Doritos and Zima at the buffet, if you can squeeze in between the ravenous Bulwark staffers stuffing their talk holes.
Who’s coming to this soiree? Well, just imagine the universe’s worst county fair dino-rock concert line-up, and this is its political equivalent. Mona Charen! Bill Kristol! David Frum! It’s basically the Swamp’s version of Bachman Turner Overdrive, Blue Öyster Cult, and Average White Band – except this band of totally white people are well below-average, though I’m sure we’ll get a fussy email reading “Excuse me, but we have a/an __________.” The closest thing to diversity I could detect in their line-up was the aptly named Heath Mayo – he’s diverse because he’s a younger kind of white person. I’m sure Mayo is ready to unleash the full benefit of his life experience upon the eager crowd – he can explain how learning about Reagan in high school in 2008 totally changed his life.
Sadly, Ana Navarro isn’t on the bill, but she probably has important work to do completing Dr. Stephen Hawking’s string theory research. And there’s no sign of Jennifer Rubin, probably because the event occurs during the hours of daylight.
Young Turks founder fights unionization. “In the staff meeting, the network’s co-founder and influential host, Cenk Uygur, urged employees not to do so, arguing that a union does not belong at a small, independent outlet like TYT, according to two workers who were present. He said if there had been a union at the network it would not have grown the way it has.” See, it’s always different when they do it…
There’s a California bill that would require porn stars to get a license. Inspector: “Yeah, I’m going to need to see your license.” Porn star (opens blouse): How about these licenses?” (Bowchickawowow…)
Hosni Mubarak dead at age 91. Of all the strongmen who have ruled Egypt, Mubarak falls in about the middle; less brutal than Morsi or Nasser, but more corrupt than Sadat or Sisi. His real downfall came from trying to install his son as a dynastic successor, at which point the army let the popular revolt oust him, leading eventually to the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief reign. He kept the peace with Israel, was a fairly reliable US ally for the region, and suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood (obviously not well enough).
Today’s elite facepalm: “Immigration to America is down. Wages are up. Are the two related?” Hey, you just might be on to something with that radical ‘supply and demand’ theory there, Einstein… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
With Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction, let’s remember what a huge Democratic Party donor he is. Also: “He faces an L.A. criminal trial soon, where 90 women have filed complaints against him, including well-known actresses Gwyneth Paltrow, Uma Thurman, and Salma Hayek.”
How a treasure trove of aviation drawings was saved from destruction thanks to a single engineer, including those for the P-51 and the B-25.
Scientist: Here’s a journal article. Editor: Think you could provide the raw data? Scientist: (Hissses, holds up arm to shield the crucifix from it’s sight, withdraws paper.)
The reviews are in for President Donald Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address. Observers seem to think he put on a home run clinic:
Trump’s speech tonight was simply spectacular, and the Democrats in the room knew it. From the unapologetic embrace of America and everything it stands for to the emotional moments with Kayla Mueller’s family and the returning soldier surprising his, it was nearly perfect.
I’m not aware of a president, since the time of Ronald Reagan, that has stood at the podium during the #SOTU and proudly kicked socialism in the teeth. I’m more than impressed.
There were many touching moments. Like the runiting of a military family following the husband’s fourth overseas deployment:
A powerful family reunion during last night’s #SOTU Address. A poignant reminder of the sacrifices American military families bear during times of war. May our bravest in uniform always be safe and protected by God almighty. https://t.co/hK0MiaYlha
One especially powerful moment: President Trump bestowing the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Rush Limbaugh, who recently announced that he has advanced lung cancer:
"Trump making Democrats sit in silence while he rewards Medal of Freedom to a crying guy with cancer. The man has powerful political instincts." — message from a fellow journalist.
President Trump’s recognition of a Tuskegee Airman? Not standing.
A small cluster of Democrats including Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Mark Pocan don't stand for Charles McGee, the former Tuskegee Airman introduced by Trump
The speech that Pelosi ripped up wasn't just any copy of the speech. It was the signed copy the President officially delivers to the Speaker before a SOTU.
It was the ultimate classless move by a classless liar.
The political equivalent of throwing one’s toys out of one’s pram (*stroller)… every time I think Democrats can’t possibly play into Trump’s hands any more, they do something like this to give him another huge boost. Madness. https://t.co/1xZ8Tu6fcI
Democrats have lived so long in the poisonous #resistance reality bubble that they have no idea how badly their petty stunts play in the rest of the country.
I suspect they’re going to find out in November, good and hard.
Williamson drops Out, Steyer eclipses Warren in two early states, the billionaire boys keep shoveling wheelbarrows full of cash into the fire, and Biden can’t tell the difference between Iran and Iraq. It’s your Democratic Presidential clown car update!
Either my Google-fu is weak or no campaigns have released Q4 fundraising totals this week. Or maybe the press just doesn’t care enough to report on any that have. I’m leaving this up because I suspect official numbers for the rest will start posting after the FEC January 15th deadline.
Fox News (Nevada): Biden 23, Sanders 17, Steyer 12, Warren 12, Buttigieg 6, Yang 4, Booker 3, Bloomberg 2, Gabbard 2, Klobuchar 2, Williamson 1. Steyer’s saturation money bombing campaign may finally be bearing fruit.
Fox News (South Carolina): Biden 36, Steyer 15, Sanders 14, Warren 10, Buttigieg 4, Bloomberg 2, Booker 2, Yang 2, Gabbard 1. Ditto.
Fox News (Wisconsin): Biden 23, Sanders 21, Warren 13, Buttigieg 9, Bloomberg 7, Klobuchar 4, Booker 3, Yang 3, Gabbard 2, Steyer 2, Williamson 1. If Klobuchar’s “I’m the most Midwest of the Midwest” strategy won’t work in Wisconsin, where will it work?
Democrats are now beginning to confront a very real scenario where the nomination — and the winnowing — will not be decided in states where campaigns have been plowing ground for more than a year, but in places and calendar dates so deep into primary season that until recently they’ve received almost no attention at all.
The Iowa field is bunched together with little daylight between a handful of well-funded candidates. Each of the four early voting states continues to present the prospect of a different winner. And, at the end of that gauntlet on Super Tuesday, a free-spending billionaire — Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor — is waiting to challenge whichever candidate or candidates emerge.
Snip.
Coloring the thinking of many Democrats is Bloomberg’s apparent willingness to spend limitless sums, leaving him poised to overwhelm their early operations across the Super Tuesday map.
For most candidates, said Scott Kozar, a Democratic ad-maker who is helping Sen. Michael Bennet with his campaign, “No one is playing in those states.”
He predicted the candidates still standing after Super Tuesday will be forced to run a “fast play” as they scramble into March.
In addition to flooding the airwaves with television ads, Bloomberg has already put more than 200 staffers on the ground in states that vote in March and April. He traveled recently to Ohio and Michigan, where he has hired senior state-level staff and plans to open 9 offices and 12 offices, respectively.
His campaign told POLITICO he plans to open five offices in Missouri, 17 in Florida and 12 in Illinois.
“Before Bloomberg got in, I said whoever wins South Carolina on February 29 will be the nominee because of the momentum factor” coming out of the first four primary states, said Bob Mulholland, a Democratic National Committee member from California. “Bloomberg kind of puts a pause on that.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, with one of the field’s most robust ground operations, has had post-Super Tuesday staffers flung out across the country for months, with a presence in Missouri , Michigan, Washington, Illinois, Ohio, Florida, Arizona and Pennsylvania, according to an aide. And Sen. Bernie Sanders has an army of volunteers held over from his 2016 campaign.
But for every other Democrat, the landscape following Super Tuesday’s gigantic delegate hauls on March 3 is relatively barren — and will likely remain so until after the initial primaries.
Total TV ad spend by 2020 candidates, through this week:
Bloomberg: $153.1 million Steyer: $116.5 million Sanders: $11.7 million Buttigieg: $11.4 million Yang: $7.3 million Warren: $3.7 million Biden: $3 million Klobuchar: $2.9 million Bennet: $1.1 million Gabbard: $1.1 million
How the New Hampshire primary traditionally works: the out-of-town press invades, occupying the Manchester Radisson like a siege army, and leans into a presumed frontrunner until he or she wins.
If the voters are very rebellious, and decide to back a different conventional politician, the press re-calibrates behind the new hotness. If voters decide to think completely for themselves, and pick a candidate not approved by the party or major media – no one knows what happens then, since we’ve never seen it, at least not on the Democratic side.
Two candidates I didn’t catch on a recent tour through the state each show how conventional campaign thinking has been upended in this cycle.
In the days after the New Year, Biden announced he’d be willing to pick a Republican running mate and also said coal miners should “learn to program.” He will go on to say “no one understood Obamacare” in Iowa. Reporters almost universally think he’d be a shit candidate against Trump, but voters haven’t agreed: he’s still at or near the top of polls.
Bernie Sanders meanwhile has spent the last four years serving as the subject of stories detailing his lack of general election viability, declining popularity, Putin-ness, physical unfitness, bad hair, and ideological unsuitability, among other things.
Yet he entered 2020 crushing the field in fundraising, raising $34.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2019, and is now a co-frontrunner with Biden in some polls. The failure of years of blunt messaging to derail a candidate like Sanders is part of what’s been driving those stories about “anxiety” among the party elders.
One candidate who has been affected by media, especially of late, is Elizabeth Warren. In Concord, I watched the news cycle take a bite out of her campaign.
New Englanders (I’m one) think they invented everything from baseball to microbreweries to the Democratic Party, and they believe the rest of the country should pay an annual thank-you dividend for the Kennedys. In regional memory, Mike Dukakis won the presidency in a landslide.
That’s why a sizable crowd in Concord responds with howls of approval when Elizabeth Warren asks, “Can we just admit that trickle-down economics is a failure?” In Phoenix, they’d ask, “What the fuck is trickle-down economics?” In parts of New England, Reagan is still president and they’re still mad about ketchup being declared a vegetable. Understanding the vagaries of Masshole chauvinism helps here.
As of this moment, if I had to place a wager I believe Bernie Sanders is going to be the Democratic nominee. But I wouldn’t necessarily bet much—the race is just too volatile.
There are a batch of polls out showing the Three Bs—Bernie, Biden, and Buttigieg—virtually tied in Iowa and New Hampshire. Keep in mind two implications of this: first, a large portion of the Democratic primary electorate—maybe half or more—is undecided, and second, between undecided Democrats and the share of votes going to the rest of the field, Biden is an extremely weak front-runner. A few more senior moments in his campaign and the race might cascade rapidly to Bernie, who has the most money to go the distance, or Buttigieg, who has the kind of fresh face Democrats often fall for—maybe too fresh a face.
The deciding factor is going to be personality, and Trump has the advantage because he has one. The question is going to be, “Who does America trust not to screw up all the repairs that Trump has made to America post-Barack Obama?”
The answer is going to be, “Not one of those quasi-commie Democrat dorks.”
There are six real candidates – sorry Yangbangers and Tulsi-touters, but those two are not in the mix.
There’s Biden. What a putz. From his bizarre behavior to his brazen demand that we just accept the manifest corruption of his boy Lil’ Crackpipe, Gropey Joe is not merely of the Swamp. He is the Swamp. And there’s no reason to believe Trump won’t drain him.
Right now, he’s the leader in the polls and he’s the most likely to be nominated. There are two reasons. The first is that he has legacy black Democrat support. He’s the closest to a traditional Democrat, as opposed to one of the faculty lounge snobs that makes up most of the rest of the race. The second is that he has been designated The Democrat Most Likely To Succeed in beating The Donald. It’s unclear why. Sure, some polls say it (though they are shifting in Trump’s direction), but the problem for Joe is that so many liberal media types are wishcasting his victory that they never hit him hard. He’s soft and open to attack. Not-Mrs. Willie Brown gently tapped him in a debate (on busing, which is very, very popular among rich Democrats whose kids would never, ever be bused in a zillion years) and Not-Senile Joe went into a tailspin. He’s vulnerable because he’s been coddled – Trump will bash Hoover Biden’s dad all over the stage, as Trump feels no obligation not to talk about the subjects that the media has deemed off-limits, like the ex-senator’s (D-Credit Card Companies) Snortunate Son.
And he’ll pick Amy Klobuchar as his running mate. She’s another one who the Democrats imagine can reach out and touch the working-class folks who went for Trump. Of course, she’ll reach out and touch them with a rock – she’s got a temper and she’ll get pilloried as a tyrant. Tyrannical women are a hard sell – just ask Stumbles McMyturn. Sure, the media has announced that she is “having her moment,” but moments stop. She’s neither interesting nor inspirational, and the very moderation she allegedly represents (she doesn’t – she’s on-board with every pinko policy her pals subscribe to) will keep her from breaking out as a candidate and depress the turn-out among the Dem left (but I repeat myself) when she’s on the ticket with Biden.
Snip.
Then there’s Chief Spewing Bull. Her own brother recently dissed her for inventing more fake family history. Trump would chew her up, spit her out, and wash the residue into the gutter. Where’s the enthusiasm for a serial fraud who compares poorly to every bitter spinster public elementary school teacher who either demanded you use your inside voice or tried to make her class celebrate Kwanza? Maybe at Harvard or The New York Times offices, and nowhere else. She sadly won’t get nominated, because she’s such a disaster Trump might get 45 states, and Biden won’t pick her as veep because he knows she’s going to be scheming and drape-measuring every time she visits the Oval Office, and the budget does not include a presidential food taster.
Maybe Bernie Sanders will get it – which would be great because then all the nimrods who pushed the phony dossier would have to concede that they were going to vote for the one candidate we absolutely know has had sex in Russia – shiver. Yeah, he had his honeymoon in the old Soviet Union, and to people who aren’t college professors or college students or aspiring college students, that’s a disqualifier. He’s a loser, and what will be great is how the Dem bigwigs try to explain to the harder left contingent why their crusty curmudgeon is getting dissed again in the primaries.
Pete Buttigieg…why? Why is he even part of this? He’s a sub-par mayor of a sub-par town in a state most Democrats have never even heard of. Really, if he’s the one the Dems are looking to for salvation – oh yeah, he says he’s a Christian too, incessantly – then they’re pretty hosed already. His candidacy will soon Pete-r out.
Though maybe Biden will pick him for VP – if so, I’ve got $10 that says Smart Joe will get caught on tape at a rally explaining to disappointed feminists that, “Well, a gay guy counts as a woman, right?” You know that will totally happen.
And tiny Michael Bloomberg’s zillion-dollar ad budget has captured him…fifth or sixth place. Fascist Frodo’s not going anywhere. He’s already lost.
Hmmm:
Tweets by Democrat presidential candidates supporting Iranian protesters today:
Joe Biden is the most likely person to win a majority of pledged Democratic delegates, according to the FiveThirtyEight primary model, which we launched on Thursday morning. This is our first-ever full-fledged model of the primaries and we’re pretty excited about it — to read more about how the model works, see here.
But saying the former vice president is the front-runner doesn’t really tell the whole story. He may be the most likely nominee, but he’s still a slight underdog relative to the field, with a 40 percent chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates1 by the time of the last scheduled Democratic contest — the Virgin Islands caucus on June 6. If one lowers the threshold to a plurality of delegates, rather than a majority, then Biden’s chances are almost 50-50, but not quite — he has a 45 percent chance of a delegate plurality, per our forecast.
Second place is a set of steak knives Sanders, and third place is “No one,” so evidently “brokered convention” has a better chance than Warren or Buttigieg. Read the piece for more 538 model wonkery. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Elected Democrats in Texas and California previously backing Castro and Harris have flocked to Biden, but when Leticia Van de Putte is the highest profile name, you’ve got nothing that’s going to move the needle. I don’t see the anti-war Democrats being wild at this statement:
BREAKING: Video emerges of @JoeBiden criticizing antiwar Dems, praising Bush for leading America into the Iraq War & promising he will support Bush's continuation of the war
"The president of the United States is a bold leader & he is popular…I & many others will support him" pic.twitter.com/Sx2zsdbSJV
At a campaign stop here, the former New York mayor said he has no intention of trying to qualify for upcoming debates — even though he almost certainly could participate if he wanted to. It was his most definitive statement to date on a stance that has rankled his opponents, who chafe at his limitless war chest and feel he should have to endure the rigors of campaigning they do.
Bloomberg insisted he’d like to debate if the rules allowed. But the billionaire, a latecomer to the Democratic primary, reasoned it is inappropriate for someone of his wealth to ask supporters for cash.
“It’s up to the Democratic Party. They have a rule that you cannot participate in the debates unless you have a few hundred thousand donors,” he told POLITICO after the campaign event Tuesday. “I don’t take any money from anybody else. I fund my campaign myself.”
Bloomberg is running aggressively to win the Democratic nomination but he is simultaneously building out a general election machine to defeat President Trump, with a new structure — data, field organizing, advertising and policy — that aims to elect Democrats up and down the ballot even if the party’s voters reject the former New York mayor this spring.
The party he is moving to transform, which he only rejoined in October, has become little more than a bystander to his ambition. With more than 800 employees, $200 million in ad spending so far and a fully catered Times Square office that houses hundreds of employees, “Mike Bloomberg 2020, Inc.” does not resemble a primary campaign in any traditional sense. It is an experiment in what happens to democracy when a single faction operates without economic constraints.
AD
While most presidential efforts start early and poor, the Bloomberg project exists in an inverted dimension, a fact that has caught the attention of Trump, who spent years tracking Bloomberg’s political career closely in New York. The president has been closely monitoring Bloomberg’s campaign, impressed by his extraordinary spending and fearful of his potential rise, according to Trump confidants with whom the president has discussed Bloomberg.
Remember, this is the Washington Post, so anytime they “quote” anonymous “sources” like “Trump confidants,” our working assumption should always be that they’re “lying.”
Bloomberg’s aides, in turn, have delighted in trying to find ways to get Trump’s attention and increase his anxiety, like the recent purchase of an $11 million Super Bowl ad that will run against a similar spot purchased by Trump’s campaign.
The extravagance is part of the message, an attempt to demonstrate his competence and show that he can manage something big with good intentions.
“We also want people to know that we are building a juggernaut pointed at Donald Trump and the Republican Party,” said Tim O’Brien, a senior adviser to the campaign who has been taking the message to state parties around the country. “One of Mike’s goals is to make a machine that lasts. This idea that he wants to do a vanity run or is just buying exposure is belied by that.”
To begin with, that means building a fully staffed general election campaign in January to win primary contests in March, with a suite of high-profile recruits on the payroll, like former top executives for Facebook, Foursquare and GroupM, the world’s largest advertising media company by billings. No one at headquarters knows what he will ultimately choose to spend, but they operate for the moment without budgets, putting the 12th richest person on the planet on a path to spend $1 billion or more.
He wants Democrats to know he is happy to spread the money around. During a swing through Texas on Saturday, when his campaign staged over 150 events in 27 states in a show of organizing prowess, he cast himself as a potential benefactor and mentor for all state and local party organizations.
“I think you look at each,” Bloomberg said, when asked if he would boost them. “You look to see how well they’re run, and if you tried to help, that you’d be able to help. That’s number one. And number two would be that your money would be used efficiently. And it’s not just money. We can bring some advice.”
Whether he wins or loses the nomination, the ubiquitous television and digital ads he is running have been crafted as the opening exchange in a conversation about Trump’s failures that will continue through November.
Also this line: “His policy, though sometimes nuanced on paper, is uncomplicated in presentation, leaning heavily on phrases known to move focus groups.” Left unasked how rank-and-file Democrats feel about their party being taken over by a billionaire. Bloomy is all in on importing cheaper foreign labor.
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Probably not? “Tulsi Gabbard: ‘Everybody knows and understands’ that Hillary Clinton is a ‘warmonger.'” I’m not necessarily disagreeing, but I wonder what Tulsi’s endgame is in this spat, other than reincarnation.
Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Delaney Looks To Build Momentum As Iowa Caucuses Draw Closer.” That would suggest he had any in the first place.
Iowa political experts say her day job representing a neighboring state, her Midwestern values and the work she has put into meeting voters in big cities and small towns in every corner of the state could result in a surprise payoff when Iowans caucus on Feb. 3.
A win for Klobuchar here doesn’t mean coming in first in Iowa, said Dianne Bystrom, director emerita of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University. It means beating expectations.
“I think Klobuchar has a chance. People really like Amy Klobuchar,” said Bystrom, who is neutral in the race.
“She is down home, and she’s funny, and she’s got this quirky charm about her,” Bystrom said.
Klobuchar is not a soaring orator; she is plainspoken and earnest. Sporting a no-muss, no-fuss bob, she offers anecdotes about parenthood and being a woman in the workplace — complete with references to hiding her gray roots — that appeal to the suburban moms who can be key to elections.
All this amounts to “We need to pump her up for the sake of drama, but, yeah, she’s toast.”
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: In. Twitter. Facebook. SuperPac makes $2 million ad buy for Patrick in early states. Given Bloomberg and Steyer’s saturation money bombing and Patrick’s 0.0 standing in all polls, that’s probably a less effective campaign tactic than throwing a giant kegger in New Hampshire and inviting every state resident to attend. “Since his late entry to the race in November, Patrick has struggled to gain traction with early-state Democratic voters or a national audience.” Like a greased man on a Teflon floor wearing sticks of butter as shoes. He’s concentrating on New Hampshire and South Carolina.
Increasingly alarmed that Bernie Sanders could become their party’s presidential nominee, establishment-minded Democrats are warning primary voters that the self-described democratic socialist would struggle to defeat President Donald Trump and hurt the party’s chances in premier House, Senate and governors’ races.
The urgent warnings come as Sanders shows new signs of strength on the ground in the first two states on the presidential primary calendar, Iowa and New Hampshire, backed by a dominant fundraising operation. The Vermont senator has largely escaped close scrutiny over the last year as his rivals doubted the quirky 78-year-old’s ability to win the nomination. But less than a month before Iowa’s kickoff caucuses, the doubters are being forced to take Sanders seriously.
Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, previously a senior aide to President Barack Obama, warned Democrats that Sanders’ status as a democratic socialist and his unwavering support for “Medicare for All” won’t play well among swing voters in the states that matter most in 2020.
“You need a candidate with a message that can help us win swing voters in battleground states,” Emanuel said in an interview. “The degree of difficulty dramatically increases under a Bernie Sanders candidacy. It just gets a lot harder.”
The increasingly vocal concerns are coming from a number of political veterans tied to the Obama administration and the 2020 field’s moderate wing, including those backing former Vice President Joe Biden, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet.
(Hat tip: Powerline.) “Of course Bernie can win,” says man waving away idea that a socialist is too far left for the American electorate. I find his arguments (such as they are) unconvincing. Sanders says that the Qassem Suleimani strike is just like Putin assassinating political rivals.
Billionaire Tom Steyer: In. Twitter. Facebook. He qualified for the January debate by polling at 12% in in Nevada and 15% in South Carolina. I never imagined there would ever be a Steyer boomlet, yet here we are. The hilarious thing about this is that it’s going to inspire Bloomberg to dump a ton more money into the race.
Along with Reps. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) and Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), Sanders and Warren are scheduled to speak Wednesday evening with members of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). The group played a central role in what former Obama national security adviser Ben Rhodes called the administration’s pro-Iran Deal “echo chamber,” spinning journalists, lawmakers, and citizens.
The Democratic candidates’ willingness to engage with NIAC—a group that aggressively pushed the accord and has strongly advocated against U.S. sanctions on the Islamic Republic—reflects their desire to see America reenter the nuclear deal, which released up to $150 billion in cash to the regime. Much of that money has gone to fund Iran’s regional terror operations, including recent attacks on American personnel stationed in the region.
NIAC has deep ties to Iran’s regime, including senior officials like Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Zarif worked closely with NIAC founder Trita Parsi, who, in turn, consulted with the Obama administration.
Parsi lobbied Congress against sanctions on Iran in 2013 and met with Obama administration officials at the White House dozens of times leading up to the nuclear deal’s signing in 2015. Multiple U.S. officials and senior congressional sources informed the Washington Free Beacon that Parsi helped the White House craft its messaging as it tried to sell the nuclear deal to the public. The NIAC chief met with Rhodes, among other top officials, during multiple visits throughout the Obama era.
That’s just part of the Warren weirdness on Iran, where in 24 hours she went from calling Suleimani a “murderer” to just “a government official, a high-ranking military official.” (There’s no end to appeasing the soft-on-Jihad loony left). Castro endorses her. Let’s check the reaction meter:
I stayed in the race to take advantage of every possible effort to share our message. With caucuses and primaries now about to begin, however, we will not be able to garner enough votes in the election to elevate our conversation any more than it is now. The primaries might be tightly contested among the top contenders, and I don’t want to get in the way of a progressive candidate winning any of them.
As of today, therefore, I’m suspending my campaign.
Farewell, Marianne. We’ll always have the memes…
New trending GIF on GIPHY dnc debates 2019, marianne williamson, dark psychic force, democratic primary debates! pic.twitter.com/gEPdDmPACI
No candidate has leaned more into the fun part of running for president than Yang. He does some high fives, then reminds all: He’s the guy who wants to give everyone $1,000 a month. He notes the state of Alaska already does something like this, divvying up oil revenues. What’s the 21st century version of oil?
Murmurs among the teenagers. Yang grins.
“It’s technology,” he says. “Although, I thought someone was going to say marijuana. And that’s cool, because I want to legalize weed, too.”
LOUD cheers. The Beavis and Butthead factor here is through the roof. Also: Yang wants to give 16-year-olds with cash and expanded relaxation options the right to vote. (Studies show this increases like likelihood of future engagement). You could cause brain bubbles in a Fox News host with a video of this Democrat recruitment scene.
Through the eyes of a rival candidate, Yang’s slang-laden pitch to high schoolers might smack of Steve Buscemi’s “How do you do, fellow kids?” routine. His speech is peppered with phrases like “That’s okay, bro.” Describing the political “disaster” previous generations have left children, he says, “You could even call it a shit show.”
But kids spot phonies quickly, and Yang isn’t failing. His campaign is meant as a warning that it’s traditional politicians who are being phony, when they don’t raise alarms about a jobs crisis brought on by automation and changes to the manufacturing economy.
He’s been evangelizing the Democratic Party to a new generation of voters, at events like these and online, where his #YangGang has been one of campaign 2020’s big marketing success stories. He raised $16.5 million in the fourth quarter, fifth among Democrats, hinting at new sources of support for the party.
But the reaction to Yang among party leaders and press has hovered between indifferent and hostile. He’s had trouble getting air time, and thanks to an arbitrary set of criteria, may be shut out of the January 14th candidate debate in Des Moines, despite poll numbers that are competitive with some already-qualified participants.
The standard requires four “qualifying” polls showing 5% support or higher, or two qualifying polls showing 7% or higher support in Iowa or New Hampshire. The problem is, there were no new state polls for over a month, making it nearly impossible for candidates on the edge to meet the increased standard.
Andrew Yang, Ken Jeong, what’s the difference? (Also note the pic for “Tulsi Gabbard.”) The Boston Heraldlikes Yang. “He is real. He talks to people — all kinds of people — and is not hindered by the unwritten rules of political tribalism and Twitter wokeness that have become wholly unproductive, if not totally exasperating….We also know that Yang is the most genuine candidate in the Democratic field, he is a successful businessman who has lived in the real world his entire life, and unlike his political competitors, still does.”
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
If you’ve read Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, you probably know the story already, but this piece provides a nice summary of the same information even if you haven’t:
The 1960s Great Society and War on Poverty programs of President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) have been a colossal and giant failure. One might make the argument that social welfare programs are the moral path for a modern government. They cannot, however, make the argument that these are in any way effective at alleviating poverty.
In fact, there is evidence that such aggressive programs might make generational poverty worse. While the notion of a “culture of dependence” is a bit of a cliché in conservative circles, there is evidence that this is indeed the case – that, consciously or not, the welfare state creates a culture where people receive benefits rather than seeking gainful employment or business ownership.
This is not a moral or even a value judgment against the people engaged in such a culture. Again, the claim is not that people “choose to be on welfare,” but simply that social welfare programs incentivize poverty, which has an impact on communities that has nothing to do with individual intent.
We are now over 50 years into the development of the Great Society and the War on Poverty. It is time to take stock in these programs from an objective and evidence-based perspective. When one does that, it is not only clear that the programs have been a failure, but also that they have disproportionately impacted the black community in the United States. The current state of dysfunction in the black community (astronomically high crime rates, very low rates of home ownership and single motherhood as the norm) are not the natural state of the black community in the United States, but closely tied to the role that social welfare programs play. Or as Dr. Thomas Sowell stated:
“If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on “the legacy of slavery” with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals.”
It then provides a nice overview of the various Great Society welfare programs before covering the the resulting breakdown of the black family, declining black participation in the labor market, etc. The section on black business ownership is one I don’t think Murray really touched on:
Participation in the labor market is not the only metric of economic activity. Another is business ownership. The years between 1900 and 1930 are known as “the Golden Age of Black Entrepreneurship.” By 1920, there were tens of thousands of black businesses in the United States, the overwhelming majority of them very small, single proprietorship. This in no way diminishes the importance of this sector of the black economy. People who had, in many cases, started their lives as slaves were now, even when “poorer” in terms of income, freer than many of their white counterparts who worked for wages.
There was also a social aspect to this period of black entrepreneurship. Black insurance companies and black-owned banks represent the apex of the economic pyramid in the black community. While the black community was comparatively poorer than its white counterparts, money spent by black Americans could stay within the black community. Thus, the black community could enrich itself from the bottom of the ladder all the way up to the top.
This concept was known as “double duty dollars.” The idea is that money spent at black businesses not only purchased goods for the consumer, but also played a role in advancing the black race in America. This, and not government handouts, was seen as the primary means of achieving, if not a perfect equality with whites, a social parity with them.
Another aspect of why black entrepreneurship was so important in the black community was that national businesses tended to ignore the black market entirely. This, however, began to change in the 1950s and, to a much greater extent, by the dawn of the next decade. No one forced national businesses to begin marketing their products to black America. National businesses simply saw that there was an emerging black middle class with money to spend and didn’t want to get cut out of the market.
Today, black business ownership is in a state of “collapse” according to Marketplace.org. This cannot entirely be laid at the foot of the Great Society. For example, the unlikely culprit of integration is one of the reasons that the black business districts began to fall apart. For example, once the biggest burger joint in town would serve black people, there was no reason to go to “the black burger joint” anymore.
Still, it’s impossible to separate the end of the thriving black business districts from the Great Society. These were once centers of the community, in addition to being centers of commerce. Now they are virtually extinct. While other factors are in play, it’s difficult to not notice the overlap between the rise of the welfare state through the Great Society, the overall decline in the black community’s civil society anchored by the black business community, and black business ownership in general.
Read the whole thing. (And read Losing Ground if you haven’t already; it’s the most important book written about welfare policy in the last half century.)
Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’s Quds Force who was killed in Iraq yesterday, was the most successful military figure of his time. One should grade success not in absolute terms, but by how much is done with how little—and on that scale, Soleimani was a prodigy. The end of his career is as pivotal in the region as the retirement of an athlete who has dominated his sport, or a musician whose sound, once unique, somehow has become imitated by every young crooner out there. One difference is that Bob Dylan is still touring and Michael Jordan has moved on to hawking sneakers and steaks. Soleimani has earned the only retirement befitting a man of his long and appalling record, which is to be vaporized in a U.S. air strike.
Soleimani’s obituaries will note his involvement in numerous wars along Iran’s periphery (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen). But all these wars are in fact one war, the sole war he was fighting for his entire career, starting from his days as a young officer in the early 1980s fighting against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Consider Iran’s pathetic fortunes then: Its civilian population cowered in terror at Iraqi air raids; its military wasted itself in “human wave” attacks that generated “martyrs” at a startling pace. The territory Iran and Iraq traded, at immense cost, was minimal, and strategically worthless. Iran’s goal (and Soleimani’s) then would have been to avoid annihilation by Iraq—and then, only as a distant dream, to overrun its enemy and capture the Shiite holy places in Najaf, Karbala, Samarra, and Baghdad.
Now the notion of Iranian control of these cities hardly beggars the strategic imagination. The Iran-Iraq War has lasted three decades longer than history supposed, and the machinations of Soleimani have been largely responsible for its outcome now looking favorable to Iran. (The other contribution to this outcome was the botched occupation of Iraq by the United States.) Because the Iraqi side of the war against the Islamic State was fought in part by Iranian-backed militias, Soleimani in 2015 could appear in the city of Tikrit while supervising a take-back operation. The power of that image to an Iranian audience that remembered the sorrows of the 1980s cannot be overstated—the most recognizable Iranian general striding confidently through Saddam’s hometown!
Reciprocity has been the key to understanding Donald Trump. Whether you are a media figure or a mullah, a prime minister or a pope, he will be good to you if you are good to him. Say something mean, though, or work against his interests, and he will respond in force. It won’t be pretty. It won’t be polite. There will be fallout. But you may think twice before crossing him again.
That has been the case with Iran. President Trump has conditioned his policies on Iranian behavior. When Iran spread its malign influence, Trump acted to check it. When Iran struck, Trump hit back: never disproportionately, never definitively. He left open the possibility of negotiations. He doesn’t want to have the Greater Middle East—whether Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, or Afghanistan—dominate his presidency the way it dominated those of Barack Obama and George W. Bush. America no longer needs Middle Eastern oil. Best keep the region on the back burner. Watch it so it doesn’t boil over. Do not overcommit resources to this underdeveloped, war-torn, sectarian land.
The result was reciprocal antagonism. In 2018, Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated by his predecessor. He began jacking up sanctions. The Iranian economy turned to shambles. This “maximum pressure” campaign of economic warfare deprived the Iranian war machine of revenue and drove a wedge between the Iranian public and the Iranian government. Trump offered the opportunity to negotiate a new agreement. Iran refused.
Mess with the bull and you get the horns. (Hat tip: Matt Mackowiak.)
Remember the reckoning Donald Trump brought to our smug, out-of-touch elites in 2016? Victor Davis Hanson says that in 2020, he’s bringing it even harder:
In my hometown near my central California farm, I spent autumn 2016 talking to mostly Mexican American friends with whom I went to grammar or high school. I had presumed then that they must hate Trump. Remember the speech in 2015 announcing he was going to stand, when he bashed illegal immigration, or his snide quip about the ‘Mexican judge’ in the Trump University lawsuit, or his expulsion of an interrupting Univision anchor, Jorge Ramos, from one of his campaign press conferences? But I heard no such thing. Most said they ‘liked’ Trump’s style, whether or not they were voting for him. They were tired of gangs in their neighborhoods and of swamped government services — especially the nearby Department of Motor Vehicles — becoming almost dysfunctional. I remember thinking that Trump of all people might get a third of the Latino vote: of no importance in blue California, but maybe transformative in Midwest swing states?
During the last two weeks I made the same rounds — a high-school football game at my alma mater, talks with Mexican American professionals, some rural farm events. Were those impressions three years ago hallucinations? Hardly. Trump support has, if anything, increased — and not just because of record low unemployment and an economy that has turned even my once-ossified rural community into a bustle of shopping, office-construction and home-building, with ‘Now Hiring’ signs commonplace. This time I noticed that my same friends always mentioned Trump in contrast to their damnation of California — the nearby ‘stupid’ high-speed rail to nowhere, the staged power shutoffs, the drought-stricken dead trees left untouched in flammable forests, the tens of thousands of homeless even in San Jose, Fresno and Sacramento, the sky-high gas prices, the deadly decrepit roads, the latest illegal-alien felon shielded from ICE. Whatever Trump was, my friends saw him as the opposite of where California is now headed. His combativeness was again not a liability but a plus — especially when it was at the expense of snooty white liberals. ‘He drives them crazy,’ Steve, my friend from second grade, offered.
One academic colleague used to caricature my observations in 2016 that Trump’s rallies were huge and rowdy, while Hillary’s seemed staged and somnolent — and that this disconnect might presage election-day turnouts. ‘Anecdotes!’ I was told. ‘Crowd size means as little as yard signs.’ If anything, Trump’s rallies now are larger, the lines longer. Maybe the successive progressive efforts to abort his presidency by means of the Electoral College, the emoluments clause, the 25th Amendment, the Mueller investigation and now Ukraine only made him stronger by virtue of not finishing him off.
When I talked to a Central Valley Rotary Club in November 2016, I assumed on arrival that such doctrinaire Republicans would be establishment Never Trumpers. But few were then. When I returned this week to speak again, I found that none are now. These businesspeople, lawyers, accountants and educators talked of the money-making economy. But I sensed, as with my hometown friends, that same something else. There was an edge in their voices, an amplification of earlier fury at Hillary’s condescension and put-down of deplorables. ‘Anything he dishes out, they deserve,’ one man in a tailored suit remarked, channeling my grade-school friend Steve. I take it by that he meant he and his friends are frequently embarrassed by Trump’s crudity — but not nearly so much as they are enraged by the sanctimoniousness of an Adam Schiff or the smug ‘bombshell’ monotony of media anchors.
It is easy to say that 2020 seems to be replaying 2016, complete with the identical insularity of progressives, as if what should never have happened then certainly cannot now. But this time around there is an even greater sense of anger and need for retribution especially among the most unlikely Trump supporters. It reflects a fed-up payback for three years of nonstop efforts to overthrow an elected president, anger at anti-Trump hysteria and weariness at being lectured. A year is a proverbial long time. The economy could tank. The president might find himself trading missiles with Iran. At 73, a sleep-deprived, hamburger-munching Trump might discover his legendary stamina finally giving out. Still, there is a growing wrath in the country, either ignored, suppressed or undetected by the partisan media. It is a desire for a reckoning with ‘them’. For lots of quiet, ordinary people, 2020 is shaping up as the get-even election — in ways that transcend even Trump himself.
“Anything Trump dishes out, they deserve.” I should put that on a T-shirt. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
President Trump’s reelection committee goes in to 2020 with $200 million on hand, which is probably more than all of the remaining Democratic contenders combined. Ann Althouse: “The news this morning is making me think of 1984. Not the book. The election. Remember that? Biggest difference: The ex-Vice-President who got his party’s nomination to fend off the hated, show-biz, imposter President… was so fresh-faced!” Oh for the youthful excitement of a 56-year old Walter Mondale…
“The reality may be the very opposite of what Democrats planned. The more the Left tries to abort the Trump presidency before the election, the more it bleeds from each of its own inflicted nicks.”
The 2016 Brexit vote revealed that a large portion of the British population was unrepresented in Westminster party politics, and its aftermath exposed the fact that a large number of politicians would stop at nothing to keep that group unrepresented. To be sure, these MPs would not have put it in such words — they thought that attempting to stop Brexit for three years was acting in their constituents’ best interests. But constituents express their beliefs at the ballot box, and most of them simply did not think that their representatives knew what was best better than they did.
There is plenty to criticize about Johnson and the government that he will now lead, but the same accusation cannot be leveled against them. Johnson ducks scrutiny, avoids substance, and can often seem entirely devoid of empathy. His campaign consisted of the three words “Get Brexit Done,” spun around like a broken play toy. But these words had more power than Labour’s message of social justice, just as the Brexit slogan “Take Back Control” held more sway than the countless predictions that Brexit would bring about economic doom in the run up to the referendum. Both phrases were fashioned by Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s infamous chief adviser, and their success point to a very simple fact: Voters believe in democracy, and they do not take nicely to politicians who don’t. No handout can compensate for the snobbery of those offering it, because voters disdain moral superiority more than they appreciate moral purity.
The roots of this tension go back decades, as successive British governments implemented EU treaties and constitutional reforms without democratic assent. In 1992, when the European Economic Community turned into the European Union, John Major’s government refused to offer the public a referendum on the issue. And in 1997, under Tony Blair, monetary policy was placed in the hands of the Bank of England. The same Blair government pushed for executive asymmetrical devolution in Scotland and Wales, without considering its extreme constitutional implications for England’s representation in Westminster. Then came the 2007 EU Lisbon Treaty, a major change to the U.K.’s constitution that Prime Minister Gordon Brown decided he could ratify without asking for voters’ consent. This move effectively rendered any future promise on migration numbers a lie, because the United Kingdom’s borders were made subservient to Eurozone economics. Voters are not stupid: They realize that an open-borders policy raises problems for the welfare state. Ignoring this fact only made room for extremism when the Eurozone’s economy eventually fell into crisis in 2008.
These were the beginnings of a political realignment that has found its voice in liberal democracies across the continent and beyond — a realignment based on the divide between democratic politics and technocratic politics, in which liberals turn to the courts in order to entrench cultural values for which they cannot not secure democratic consent. The Blair years might have seen continuous government, but they also saw a significant drop in voter participation. Labour’s 2001 and 2005 electoral victories saw turnouts of 59.4 percent and 61.4 percent, respectively — some of the highest levels of voter apathy recorded since World War II. This was rule under the primacy of law and economics masked by the pretense of political consent and temporary economic stability. Divides between the electorate and their representatives on questions of immigration, foreign policy, and national identity were buried under a centrist carpet.
Brexit brought the divide into the open, because it gave voters an opportunity to reject the new constitution of a United Kingdom that had been radically transformed since it joined the EU in 1973. An unprecedented number of people did exactly that, and it is no surprise that this vote then took on the political and cultural significance that it did. Politicians across the Commons agreed to let the voters decide, only to explain away the referendum’s result as an aberration of common sense. Such arrogance meant that Brexit became a symbol of the cultural divide between those who had political control and those whose wishes were considered problems to be solved.
Any politician unwilling to reckon with the scale of the referendum was destined to shrivel into electoral insignificance. Corbyn had no easy way out, because Labour was effectively three different constituencies mashed uncomfortably into one party: middle-class Remainer liberals, woke millennial students, and socially conservative workers. These groups hold irreconcilable views on Brexit and stand in different places along the democratic–technocratic divide. It is a split similarly represented by their Westminster MPs, albeit in distinctly different ratios.
When Corbyn tried to win over Brexit voters, he could not deny that he had allowed a majority of his MPs to prevent Brexit’s implementation. And when he tried to win over Remainers, he was forced to face the fact that he had never been a Remainer (not to mention the fact that his anti-Western brand of foreign policy is antithetical to many Remainers’ liberal internationalism). The only group that truly stuck by him were the students, and anyone who knows anything about democracy knows that students don’t win you elections.
Two dispatches from Adler’s Austin. First: “Man allegedly made bomb threat then stood in traffic and threw himself at car.”
Second: “Austin attacker sentenced to 200 days in jail released two weeks later.” That’s the Congress Avenue Bridge attack case. (Hat tip: Austin_Network.)
The Jersey City murders are the culmination of years of incitement against Jews. But the perpetrators in that case were themselves minorities from the African American community. The perpetrators have been identified as coming from an extremist religious group called Black Hebrew Israelites, making them a minority of a minority. The perpetrators are seen as a “militant” fringe within that minority.
The authorities are now looking at the case as domestic terrorism fueled by antisemitism. However major media have endeavored to dismiss the murders as unimportant and unique. The New York Times described the Black Hebrew Israelites as being “known for their inflammatory sidewalk ministers who employ provocation as a form of gospel.” It’s a bit more than that. In fact, the group and the milieu around it tend to view religion through a racial lens, such that Jews are described as “white” and “fake” and the “real Jews” are portrayed as black, along with all the prophets and religious figures. The ADL pointed out that this group views itself as the real “chosen people” and that it sees people of color as the real descendants of the 12 tribes. The group was in the media earlier in the year in Washington DC when they shouted insults at Catholic high school students.
Mainstream society wants to view this as “provocation,” because if they viewed it as a burgeoning racist violent movement targeting Jews then they would have to confront it and ask tough questions of why it is tolerated in a community. Expert J.J. McNab told the Associated Press that in fact this group takes pride in “confronting Jewish people everywhere and explaining that they are evil.”
In American society there is generally only place for one kind of racism. There are far-right white supremacists and everyone else. This Manichean worldview of antisemitism and racism means we are only comfortable with one type of perpetrator. An angry white man. Those are the racists. Dylann Roof, the racist who murdered black people in a church in 2015 is the most normal kind of America racist. The El Paso shooter or the Tree of Life Synagogue attacker are also the kind of killers that fit into an easy narrative. But when the perpetrators stray from that we have a problem dealing with it. In New York City, according to a post by journalist Laura Adkins, data shows that of 69 anti-Jewish crimes in 2018, forty of the perpetrators were labelled “white” and 25 were labelled “black,” the others were categorized as Hispanic or Asian.
To keep the focus on the white supremacists, headlines need to explain to us that “right wing terrorists” have killed more than Jihadists, as Slate.com said earlier this year. Other types of terrorism are watered down a bit. During the Obama administration Islamist-inspired terror was even rebranded as “violent extremism” so as not to mention the religion of the perpetrators. For some reason even though Islamist terror is also a far-right ideology, it is portrayed as something else. For instance, when Jews were targeted at a kosher supermarket in France they were called “random folk in a deli.” They weren’t random, they were targeted, like the Jews in Jersey City, but they needed to be random or we’d have to ask about the antisemitism that permeates Islamist terror.
In the wake of all the attacks in New York against Jews, culminating in the shooting attack at the kosher market, it became difficult to ignore the rising tide. But there is discomfort in looking at the depth of the perpetrators. The comfort society has with expecting perpetrators to be “far-right” and “white” even led Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib to blame “white supremacy” for the Jersey City attack. Her tweet was deleted. When it wasn’t white supremacy and there was no one to condemn, it didn’t fit the narrative and was less important.
Snip.
How did we get here? The motivation behind the Jersey City attack is clear from social media posts one of the perpetrators made, according to a research by the ADL. This included claims that Jews are “Khazars,” and that “Brooklyn is full of Nazis-Ashkenazis,” and that the “police are in their [the Jews] hand now.” The worldview matches with the larger milieu in which Jews are portrayed as not merely “white Jews” but in fact as controlling the slave trade and police violence. In this new antisemitism Jews are reframed as both being “fake,” as in not really Jews from the Middle East, and also being “white” and running white supremacism. This replaces German Nazis with Jewish Nazis; it replaces white supremacists with a hidden hand of Jews controlling both the American far-right and also the police. Instead of pushing back against this there are attempts to excuse it or just remain quiet about it and hope this antisemitism goes away.
Left out of this Jerusalem Post piece is the fact that blacks provide a disproportionate share of Democratic Party voters, while Jews are heavily over-represented among its big-money donor base. Pointing out that one part of the Democratic Party coalition routinely commits assault against the part actually paying the bills isn’t useful to the narrative…
Will Betelgeuse go supernova? Supposedly it’s “not likely to produce a gamma-ray burst and is not close enough for its x-rays, ultraviolet radiation, or ejected material to cause significant effects on Earth.” A good thing, too, since it’s only 640 light years away, which is practically next door in galactic terms.
(@sirhottest) 
Namikaze (@Duke_Lucas_) 
