#BlackLivesMatters is a radical Marxist organization dedicated to destroying every American institution that stands in the way of achieving total power for the radical left. The fact that it has gotten as far as it has toward achieving that goal is a testament to both the deep pockets of its shadowy financial backers and the all-powerful sway the idea of white guilt has over liberal minds. Nominally rational liberals have been fooled into falling for a bait-and-switch where they think their dollars and pledges of support are actually going toward reducing police brutality rather than bankrolling a radical Marxist agenda.
Let’s look at the real #BlackLivesMatters agenda:
Black Lives Matter as a movement represents the hopes and dreams of leftist organizers who shared with us that, until now, they had never felt such a sense of hope and excitement that their goal – as one operative put it, “total social upheaval,” and “systemic change” – could be realized in their lifetime. From veteran agitators like the Weather Underground’s Bill Ayers to a new crop of social-media-wielding female and LGBTQ leaders, Black Lives Matter is encapsulating the hopes and dreams of multiple generations of progressives in a way, they say, no movement has before.
The three female founders of the movement have made it clear, and the message has seeded itself as far down the chain as the operatives we spoke with, that Black Lives Matter is the vessel through which all progressive causes can flow. LGBTQ, illegal immigration, abortion, and countless other causes are simmering just beneath the public face of the focus on police violence. Even police violence flows neatly, according to Black Lives Matter, into economic violence – wage issues, workers rights . . . The panoply of leftist groups come together under this banner.
Cop Hate is critical and central to BLM’s strategy, because by vilifying the police, by portraying individual officers and departments in general as racist, despite clear evidence refuting “systemic” charges, it will achieve the objective of harming the principle of the rule of law. That is vital. And when that happens, the Left will strike and strike hard, and in many places, strike with impunity. Also from the report’s introduction:
Black Lives Matter presents an alternative view of the American story, rooted in Marxism and one that thrives on encouraging division. Many have criticized its avoidance of facts about bias in policing — facts that would directly counter the Black Lives Matter narrative. Nevertheless, it has captured the nation’s attention through its use of social-media and cameras but also by recruiting the young Americans who will fi ll the streets with their presence and engage the public’s interest with their fervor.
If Black Lives Matter succeeds, it will have reengineered the minds of America to view our system, our history, and our future, through the lens of division and hate. In its dishonest weakening of public trust in the police officer, the representative of law and order and equality before the law, Black Lives Matter weakens the very foundations of our country.
To counter this advance, marketers of freedom must understand why they are losing mindshare to the left’s Black Lives Matter ideology if they are to effectively counter their messages and rebuild demand for our principles.
The beauty, if you will, of BLM’s Cop Hate strategy is that it gives protestors actual foes, living and breathing, precincts, fat, juicy targets, as opposed to faceless programs or inert principles:
The police, as representatives of the state, must be messaged as exemplifying the Black Lives Matter framing by being themselves oppressive and racist.
Focusing vitriol against law enforcement officers is way to translate a political ideology (Marxism) into a tangible enemy that adherents can picture, encounter, and target. By seeking out stories of potential (founded and unfounded) injustices perpetrated by police and encouraging mass outrage in reaction to them, BLM is able to channel the emotion their message fosters against an enemy people can see. . . .
Snip.
Key to BLM’s strategy is suppressing free speech and dissent, by means of force and intimidation if necessary. And so it has come to pass that if you stand on the sidewalk to oppose a protest, you will get a concrete shake bounced off your head, (the assailant will not be charged) and a tweet of repute will result in a pink slip. The Orwellian media — a force multiplier for BLM’s messaging — seems not to notice the suppression of free-speech rights. Heck, they don’t see riots and fires before their cameras. From the report (again, keep in mind it was written in 2016):
The Black Lives Matter movement is wholly against dissent and freedom of speech and their success rests upon the silencing of dissent, but they are savvy enough to accomplish this through other means than solely legal. First, Black Lives Matter has created an atmosphere where forces more emotionally compelling than “truth-seeking” encourage fealty through the threatened stigma of being an outsider, and discourage diversity of opinion. Through our research, we found that both the Activists and the Allies were united by the fear of being ostracized from the left’s cultural community and clung to the community they were provided by publicly supporting Black Lives Matter.
Black Lives Matter frequently uses shows of force – either by seeking them from university administrators or through aggressive demonstrations – to silence dissent, as well. Activists recounted to us that they found it appropriate to ask administrators to step in and stop perceived “hate speech,” although they considered themselves to be supporters of free speech. Finally, by portraying criticism of their cause as an attempt to stifle their speech, they in effect demand freedom from criticism.
Remember how Bret Weinstein talked about how these tactics were used in college. He also talked about the Maoist brainwashing nature of their tactics: The target is made to admit one obvious thing (“the United States is not perfect”), and then once they have given in to that, is pressured to agree to increasingly radical statements. For #BlackLivesMatters, this starts with a true statement (“police brutality exists”), which then leads directly to a false premise (“police are murdering black Americans at a high rate”) so that each statistically rare incident can be hyped to produce riots.
Who says they’re radical Marxists? They do.
BLM happily self-identifies as a neo-Marxist movement with various far left objectives, including defunding the police (an evolution of the [Black] Panther position of public open-carry to control the police), to dismantling capitalism and the patriarchal system, disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure, seeking reparations from slavery to redistribute wealth and via various offshoot appeals, to raise money to bail black prisoners awaiting trial. The notion of seizing control of the apportionment of capital, dismantling the frameworks of society and neutralising and undermining law enforcement are not just Marxist, but anarchic.
And if that’s not enough, how about from #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Patrice Cullors?
BLM: “We are trained Marxists.”
I did NOT see that coming.pic.twitter.com/8Xobdnukhq
— Ian McKelvey (@ian_mckelvey) June 21, 2020
In addition to founding #BlackLivesMatters, Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi were all part of Freedom Road Socialist Organization, a Marxist-Lenninist groups dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism.
What do the people providing financial and organizational backing want? Very possibly different things. I’m sure that ActBlue, the Democratic Party fundraising arm collecting money for them, see it as a means of harvesting donations. And we’ve already talked about George Soros’ backing of them. Stacey Lennox notes how they fit into something called the Momentum Community, which cites #BlackLivesMatter, the Dream Movement, and Occupy Wall Street:
All have clear Marxist aims that have significant overlap. What we are seeing is a group of affinity-based organizations around issues such as climate or some immutable characteristic such as race that all advocate for the same collectivist policies. And these policies have very little to do with the organizing principle of the not-for-profits involved. Momentum is pretty transparent about this.
Lennox suggests that the #BlackLivesMatter/antifa riots we’re seeing now are just a dry run to de-legitimize a successful Trump’s reelection with cries of voter suppression.
#BlackLivesMatters is far more concerned with overthrowing capitalism than actually improving the lives of black Americans.
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! We start off with two pieces I meant to include in this piece, but sorted the links to the wrong topic…
It’s certainly frustrating to watch a pack of reeking leftist scumbags declare a portion of an American city an “autonomous zone” – what is it with Democrats and their secession fetish? – but do not get frustrated because Donald Trump has not sent the 101st Airborne in to powerwash the human grunge from Seattle’s feces-bedecked streets.
That’s what the Democrats want. And Trump – a better strategic thinker than all the media geniuses, hack politicians, and Afghan War-losing generals who cry about him – is not only not going to give them the victory they crave. He’s going to jam their cheesy plan down their throats.
The libs’ plan to win in November corresponds to Trump’s plan to crush them yet again. Skeptical? Consider this. In the five years since he rode down that escalator bringin’ hell with him, how many times have they come at Trump and won? Zero. He’s spent half a decade on the edge of doom and he’s still here. Why would you think that the walls are suddenly closing in now? You shouldn’t.
Let’s understand the strategic scenario. The long-term strategic objective of the leftists is to turn the United States into Venezuela, and they want to be Maduro. The major strategic objective that will put them in position to do so is victory in the November elections. Everything happening right now is part of their overall strategy to achieve that objective. But what kind of operation are they using to achieve that objective? There are two types of operations relevant here – kinetic and information. A kinetic operation is actual warfare. It’s violence designed to defeat the enemy and cause his surrender by either physically destroying him or occupying his territory and compelling surrender. An information operation is designed to affect the perceptions, and thereby the actions, of the target. Kinetic ops tend to do something to the enemy; and info op tends to get the target to do something to himself.
Elections are usually information operations. They attempt to build a narrative and play on perceptions and cause the target to take the action that will lead to victory. That is, get the target (the electorate) vote for the candidate the info operator wants elected.
Okay, so what is the 2020 elections, with the rioting, vandalism, violence and occupations?
This still an information operation, not a kinetic one.
They want to convince us we are powerless, that everyone else supports their commie agenda, that we cannot win. Their tactics are designed to create that impression and crush our morale. These include the 24/7 media hype, the outright media lies, the movie stars with their dumb PSAs, the staged statue attacks, the corporate solidarity proclamations, the social media cancellations, and the craven kneeling by people who are supposed to stand up for us. But another tactic, familiar to any student of insurgencies, is to provoke an overreaction by those in power in order to undermine its moral authority. They want is to make us (including the president) think this is a kinetic operation, and get our side to make fundamental strategic errors by failing to recognize the true nature of the threat. They hope that such a mismatch between perception and reality will then lead to gravely damaging blunders. One of those would be Trump succumbing to his legit frustration and sending in a bunch of federal troops to crack skulls in Seattle.
Defining this insurgency as a kinetic operation supports the leftists’ information operation goal of making Americans perceive the situation as out of control, of there being chaos, and of making the election of Grandpa Badfinger being the only thing that will resolve the situation. But there is no kinetic situation to resolve – at least none that is strategically significant in a kinetic sense. Despite the hype, the protests may have involved a peak of 2 million people across the country – out of 330 million. That’s nothing kinetically; it’s significant informationally because it is pushed by so many cultural influencers. The scurvy scumbags of Antifa hold essentially no ground except the turf they are physically standing on at the moment, and that is minuscule. Even the hilarious Road Warrior Republic of Seattle is not even a rounding error of a rounding error in terms of US territory. It’s significant only in the context of an information operation.
Many of us cons are furious that Trump is “doing nothing.” This is the wrong thing to think. Trump is only doing nothing if this is a kinetic operation; because this is an information operation, not going kinetic (sending in the troops) is doing something. And in fact, Trump is employing the law enforcement component of his kinetic assets by having the feds wait and arrest Antifa types after the protests end, and hitting them with hardcore federal rioting-related charges. Previously, they would get ticketed and released; now, looking at a five-to-ten stretch, the lawyers their daddies hired to get these sunshine anarchists out of their beefs are going to be advising them to roll over so they can start back up at Cornell in September and not at Leavenworth.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Who benefits then from our national nervous breakdown that never seems to end?
It is the globalist elites who still govern most of our society today, despite the invasion of Donald Trump.
And those elites wish to continue that rule through what they fervently hope will come as the outcome of these demonstrations—more government control, particularly government control that helps them.
They have seen it done elsewhere with results they might want to emulate, at least until recently.
Call it China Envy.
The Chinese Communist Party has, over the years, found a way to regulate their society to an extraordinary degree via a form of communism that maximizes profits and power for those (party) elites while holding the masses largely at bay.
No wonder our elites are jealous.
People call ours “globalists” but they’re not really global. They’re selectively global, but actually just greedy and power-hungry, like the ChiComs.
Whether planned or not, or partially planned, the current confluence of catastrophes has offered them an opportunity to advance their cause against their natural adversary, Mr. Trump.
In macro, that is the landscape of election 2020—the globalist elites represented, for the moment anyway, by Joe Biden versus the American people, represented by Donald Trump.
Many of those American people, heavily influenced by the media and repelled by the president’s rhetoric, do not realize that he is representing them, but he is. Ignorant, often willfully, they oppose him tooth and nail.
An equal number, or possibly larger, as the one million plus requesting tickets to his Tulsa rally indicates, supports Mr. Trump.
We are in the midst of a Battle Royale for the soul of our nation, whether it remains more or less the democratic republic the Founders envisioned or becomes an Americanized version of what has been evolved by the CCP.
If the latter, ironically, then such groups as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa will be kicked to the curb once victory has been achieved and secured.
(Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
It’s always the same thing: Our newspapers are full of intense interest in Harvard’s admissions standards but have very little to say about New York City’s dropout rate. People can’t help being fascinated with themselves and their peers. If you want to know what is on the minds of the leaders of the American ruling class, it’s no secret. They’ll tell you, if you ask — and if you don’t.
George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police. More than a third of black students will drop out of high school in Milwaukee. But Forbes has announced a change in its in-house stylebook and will henceforth honor the woke convention of uppercase Black vs. lowercase white. And George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police.
Oh, but they got James Bennet, the opinion editor at the New York Times. And surely that is something? It is, indeed, a very useful illustration of the E-Class vs. S-Class divide. Bennet was fired after purportedly endangering the lives of black Times staffers — a charge no mentally normal adult actually takes seriously — by publishing a guest column about the riots and the Insurrection Act by Senator Tom Cotton. The campaign to end Bennet did not come from America’s poor black communities as the workers of the world looked up, stunned, from page A24 of the New York Times — the venom came straight and undiluted from 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y., with Bennet’s underlings and juniors more or less putting him on an ice floe and pushing him out to sea.
Bennet was pushed out on behalf of marginalized black Americans, which necessitated that Bennet immediately be replaced by . . . a well-off white woman who went to Georgetown and Columbia and won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about that great loathsome theater of American middle-class anxiety: restaurants. (“The real price of inexpensive menu items,” the Pulitzer people summarized.) Well-off white women from elite colleges run the diversity-and-sensitivity racket like the 17th-century Dutch ran the tulip racket, like the De Beers cartel used to run diamonds. Big Caitlyn is getting paid. Affluent white women are the main E-Class beneficiaries of the current headhunting project to clear a little room at the top, just as they have historically been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative-action programs, contracting set-asides, and other programs to help out the poor disenfranchised Georgetown alumni out there in the cold and dark.
- Tie his opponents to the worst excesses of anti-police activism in major cities, all of which are controlled by Democrats.
- Ensure that Trump’s support for law and order is coupled with sensitivity and practical measures to limit excess force.
- Adopt shared ideas for police reform, make them his own, and leave Democrats backing only more controversial ones.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instpundit.)
these riots and their associated melodrama might most accurately be called the Nov. 3 riots. It’s the prospect of the election, especially the possibility that President Donald Trump will be reelected, which provides the fuel for the current hysteria.
But Simon is right. A solid majority of voters are disgusted by what they see. There is a large overdraft on the country’s budget of white guilt. Expect a foreclosure on the account Nov. 3. Yes, yes, the situation is fluid and a week, as Harold Wilson once observed, is a long time in politics. But a biopsy of the body politic in mid-June 2020 doesn’t bode well for the old man in the basement or scriptwriters Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
The longer this madness continues, the more likely it is that the president will enjoy a victory of historic proportions.
Exactly the sort of Antifa winners you would expect to loot a Target
Rocket fuel storage facility explosion in #China, the air catches fire before the explosion, the orange smoke is a clear indication of rocket fuel. The Shockwave shatters the glass of the nearby textile mill. You will not find this story on Chinese "news"
— Harry Chen PhD (@PhdParody) June 15, 2020
me, two minutes after saying i wasn't hungry pic.twitter.com/qWLq53AAio
— Dogs Funny (@DogsFunni) June 15, 2020
Biden comes out of his basement and sees his shadow, more questions about China and Ukraine, more veepstakes, and questioning just how much of that #BlackLivesMatter money ActBlue is raking in goes to Biden. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
After reaching the BLM homepage, which features a “Defund The Police” petition front and center, if a user chooses to donate, they’re rerouted to a site hosted by ActBlue and prompted with the message: “We appreciate your support of the movement and our ongoing fight to end state-sanctioned violence, liberate Black people, and end white supremacy forever.”
Joe Biden is the top beneficiary of the ActBlue’s fundraising efforts.
Is there any evidence that BLM funds donated through ActBlue aren’t going to Biden? If so, who are the recipients?
Listen to racist .@JoeBiden attack blacks as worthless predators on our streets. https://t.co/SjPUIgkaTM
— Glen Woodfin (@GlenWoodfin) June 14, 2020
"He can run but he won't be able to hide his record"
Say No To #JimCrowJoe! pic.twitter.com/NKvBgFjFdj— Diamond and Silk® (@DiamondandSilk) June 13, 2020
I’m not sure that highlighting the 1994 crime bill will actually cost Biden votes, but showing videos like this does provide a stark contrast of the Joe Biden of today and the Joe Biden of the past who obviously had a far more functional brain…
Creepy Joe Biden is beginning to emerge from the basement again, and the results have not been auspicious thus far.
Cut to Philadelphia, Wednesday. He was sporting the de rigueur mask, but it was dangling loosely from his left ear, as if he’d forgotten it. That made his statement attacking President Trump (I think) all the more bizarre.
All dialogue guaranteed verbatim:
“You know, the rapidly rising uh, um, uh, in with the — with the — I don’t know, uh uh,” he said, finally looking up in utter confusion from his notes.
“His, his just inability to focus on any federal responsibility,” Biden mumbled, and I don’t believe he’s been seen outside the basement since.
That latest stumble got a good leaving alone from approximately 99% of the media’s Democrat stenographers. So the next day the Trump campaign manager put out an email demanding that the press’s Democrat rump swabs “stop protecting Biden.”
“The failure to expose the American people to these rambling displays of incoherence, ineptitude and forgetfulness is depriving voters of a clear picture of Biden’s inability to execute the duties of the office he seeks.”
Which is exactly why Biden’s comrades in the media are doing their damnedest to keep him under wraps.
Staying out of the limelight is good for Biden because the election is not about him. It’s about Trump and his missteps, and Biden is the generic Democratic alternative to another four years of the current administration.
Biden’s campaign is explicitly trying to define the election based on whether or not to give Trump four more years in office. A slide in a Biden campaign strategy briefing last month said, “This election is a referendum on Trump.”
“If the country is asked to have an up or down vote on whether or not Donald Trump should receive four more years, the country would say no, and [the Trump campaign] themselves admit it,” Biden campaign strategist Mike Donilon said during the presentation.
Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe plainly explained why Biden does not need to be out in the open during a video call with a local Democratic group over the weekend.
“People say all the time, ‘Oh, we got to get the vice president out of the basement,’ He’s fine in the basement,” McAuliffe said. “Two people see him a day: his two body people. That’s it.”
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Joe Biden doesn't know what Juneteenth is:
"He’s going down to Texas on Juneteenth, right? The first major massacre … of the Black Wall Street, right?"
1. President Trump is going to Texas today, not June 19
2. Juneteenth is about emancipation
3. The massacre was in Oklahoma pic.twitter.com/vpNDQLwqBj— Trump War Room – Text TRUMP to 88022 & get the APP (@TrumpWarRoom) June 11, 2020
Will a Joe Biden presidency derail housing reform and the “recap and release” of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?
The answer is a resounding “yes,” according to housing analysts who have ties to Biden’s economic advisers and their thinking on what might happen to the housing giants, if as current polls suggest, the former vice president unseats Donald Trump and becomes president in November….affordable housing is a significant issue to Biden and he would like to expand Fannie and Freddie’s mandate and likely keep them under government control.
Of course they do. How else are Democrats supposed to rake off the graft?
We all agreed that Trump has been too tepid lately and not using the instincts that blew up the political world in 2016.
We are all aware that Joe Biden has benefited greatly from his pandemic-induced basement quarantine. He’s such a train wreck that his handlers are no doubt working overtime to come up with excuses to keep him away from the campaign trail and — more importantly — from sharing a debate stage with President Trump.
The three of us agreed that President Trump needs to seize the initiative now and start goading Biden to get back in the public eye and into a debate. One of Trump’s greatest gifts is the thing that drives old guard Republicans crazy — his ability to drive a narrative on social media. Now is the time for him to use that bully pulpit and relentlessly bait Biden and force his hand.
Biden can’t win a Twitter throwdown with Trump. His handlers are tweeting for him and they are not the most inventive lot. His Twitter feed reads like something that came from a book titled “Democrat-y Stuff Candidates Should Say.” It would be very easy for the president to make Crazy Joe the Wonder Veep look awful all day, every day. The end game is to get Biden back in public, of course, but there is an immediate return on investment in a Twitter flame war.
In my five years of watching Donald Trump in the political arena, the only thing I’ve learned is that Trump probably isn’t going to do what I expect him to do, or think he should, and that what he ends up doing will probably be more effective than what I suggested. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Biden spent over three decades opening American markets to Chinese goods, ignoring China’s abhorrent human rights record, and dismissing the challenge posed by our greatest rival for global leadership. The “made in China” era coincided with the closure of tens of thousands of American factories, stagnant working-class wages, and the loss of America’s ability to produce essential goods domestically — a vulnerability that took on incredible significance when we learned that we were dependent upon China to produce the medical equipment needed to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
This disaster was facilitated by politicians of both parties, and no one was more gung ho than Joe Biden, the poster child for the globalism that reigned supreme until the 2016 presidential election, which Donald J. Trump won by campaigning on a platform diametrically opposed to the “open markets and open borders” philosophy of the D.C. establishment. In the White House, President Trump became the first American leader in decades to take a firm stand against China’s malfeasance and demand a genuinely fair and reciprocal trade deal for American workers.
While Joe Biden was the vice president of the United States, conversely, he was downplaying the consequences of China’s rise — even as his own family tried to get rich through deals with Chinese state-owned companies.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
As data show recent riots and the months-long COVID-19 economic shutdown hurt black-owned businesses more than any other racial group, the Trump campaign slammed rival presidential candidate Joe Biden for a “weak” response to these challenges.
Democratic governors generally have been more hesitant to reopen their states’ economies than Republicans, leading to criticism from President Trump and his campaign, which argues that delays hurt black-owned enterprises.
The Trump campaign pointed to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research showing there has been a a 41% decline in the number of black business owners from February to April of this year, driven by the COVID-19 shutdown.
“President Trump’s background as an entrepreneur and builder shapes his passion for protecting, supporting and empowering American black-owned business owners, especially right now,” Paris Dennard, Black Voices for Trump Advisory Board member told Just the News. “Every day Joe Biden fails to strongly call an end to the looting, and rioting in urban cities, more black-owned businesses are destroyed. Every day Joe Biden fails to support efforts to safely and expeditiously re-open the economy, more black businesses are destroyed. The data shows a prolonged economic shutdown hurts black American entrepreneurs, so Joe Biden’s opposition is standing in the way of black generational wealth, growth and opportunities.”
The search committee has been in touch with roughly a dozen women, and some eight or nine are already being vetted more intensively.
Among that group are two contenders who have recently grown in prominence, Representative Val Demings of Florida and Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta. One well-known candidate, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, has lost her perch as a front-runner. And some lower-profile candidates, like Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, are advancing steadily in the search process.
Meaningless boilerplate horse-race verbiage snipped.
Some of the contenders who have advanced furthest in the process are well known, including Senators Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. But The Times confirmed that several other women — whose names have been repeatedly floated but who have not publicly confirmed that they agreed to be vetted for the job — are under active consideration as well.
Ms. Harris and Ms. Warren have been interviewed at length by Mr. Biden’s team, as has Ms. Baldwin, who was the first openly gay candidate ever elected to the Senate.
Two women with distinctive national-defense credentials have also been interviewed and asked for documents: Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, an Iraq war combat veteran who is Asian-American, and Susan Rice, the former national security adviser to President Barack Obama and the first black woman to serve as ambassador to the United Nations.
As the vetting process advances to a newly intense phase, the political currents of the last few weeks are also leaving a mark on the Biden team’s deliberations. The wave of demonstrations touched off by the killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man, at the hands of a white police officer there, has elevated a pair of black women long regarded as intriguing long-shot candidates: Ms. Demings and Ms. Bottoms.
Though Ms. Demings and Ms. Bottoms are far less known to the national electorate than other figures on Mr. Biden’s list, they have played crucial roles in a cascading civil rights crisis: Ms. Demings, a former police chief in Orlando, Fla., has become a major figure in the law-enforcement debate, while Ms. Bottoms’s handling of chaotic demonstrations in her city earned her national acclaim.
For “national acclaim” read “less incompetent than other Democratic mayors.
🚨Joe Biden called the United Daughters Of The Confederacy "an organization made up of many fine people who continue to display the Confederate flag."
So there ya go. @JoeBiden is a racist. I mean, according to democrats this should cancel him. Right??
pic.twitter.com/TJaNMRki6C— Jali_Cat{⭐️} (@Jali_Cat) June 14, 2020
Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:
If this is what “mostly peaceful” protestors do, you’d hate to see violent ones.
Also: Open thread. Talk about whatever you want, just keep it civil.
Riots! Guns! Social Justice Warriors! Animated police dogs! Today’s LinkSwarm is packed to its furry ears…
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.
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.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
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.
Country doesn't have a color. pic.twitter.com/0sNI4tZds1
— L (@SomeBitchIKnow) June 6, 2020
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.”
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
.@BretWeinstein was demonized for being right. pic.twitter.com/PZK8ULZfl9
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) June 7, 2020
“These ideas are wrong.”
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.
“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.”
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?
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) June 11, 2020
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
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) June 11, 2020
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 hard left has gone from crazy to super-mega-crazy in less than two weeks.
First is the sudden irrational enthusiasm for defunding the police:
DEFUND THE POLICE! DEFUND THE POLICE! What seemed like a crazy slogan on the far left is threatening to become a reality in some places around the country. On Sunday the president of the Minneapolis City Council announced that a two-thirds majority of the council now supports “ending the Minneapolis Police Department.” Council members said they will be “taking intermediate steps towards ending the MPD through the budget process and other policy and budget decisions over the coming weeks and months.”
You ask what that means when someone commits a murder and they’re all “I dunno!”
Early signs are not encouraging:
On Sunday, a record 18 people were killed in Chicago in the worst single day of violence in 60 years, since the University of Chicago’s crime lab began keeping records in 1961. In total, over the weekend, 92 were shot and 27 succumbed to their wounds. All of the pictures of the known victims indicate they were African-Americans. And unlike with coronavirus, nearly all the victims were very young with much more life to live. Who is going to kneel on the ground for them? Who is going to pass legislation deterring repeat violent offenders, ending bail and parole for career criminals, and prescribing tougher sentences on gun felons? Well, certainly not the people using George Floyd’s death to promote the exact opposite.
The reality is that at least 17 people have been killed so far during the riots. However, as we see from Chicago and other cities, an unknown number – possibly totaling in the hundreds – have died likely as the result of police taking a hands-off approach to their work. The results of the riots and the war on cops are more deadly for African-Americans than anything imaginable.
Snip.
Police are getting beaten and can’t defend themselves lest they face prosecution. Over 300 NYPD officers have been injured in the riots. Few will see justice. In Los Angeles, the prosecutor announced that few rioters will face charges and all those who violated curfew will be free from criminal charges. In Chicago alone, in just nine days, 2,665 arrests have been made for civil unrest and disorderly, 788 arrests for looting, and 525 guns recovered. Watch for the same people who claim to abhor guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens to suddenly ignore these gun crimes.
What is the point of being a cop in America today? According to the FBI, in 2018, there were 58,866 assaults against law enforcement officers, resulting in 18,005 injuries. You almost never heard about them. God knows how many are taking place today. The resignations and retirements will continue while new recruitment will be nonexistent. The ones who don’t resign will be fired unless they kneel to the mob, like one police chief in Michigan who was forced out after voicing support for people engaging in open carry to protect their families from the politically untouchable rioters.
Want a preview of what the future looks like? Los Angeles homicides are up 250% during the riot week.
The notion that dangerous cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York will suddenly become feel-good hugfests if their police departments are defunded is patently absurd. The fact that they’ve all just experienced elevated levels of violence that have been perpetrated by the very people making the defund demand is indicative of just how bat-you-know-what crazy the mainstream American left has become. They can’t be left in charge of anything.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Did you notice that Seattle antifa just declared their own autonomous zone there and occupied City Hall while the police just retreat? How’s that working out?
BREAKING: Antifa mob planning to take over more Seattle neighbourhoodshttps://t.co/JFOo3YwnLw
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) June 10, 2020
The antifa #CapitalHillAutonomousZone in Seattle has a subreddit set up. They are posting about making homemade chemical weapons, maintaining supply lines, & how to use those armed with guns to push police back. #antifa @FBISeattle pic.twitter.com/gDub2G49KU
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) June 10, 2020
Sources tell me there are those in the #CapitalHillAutonomousZone who are “shaking down” businesses by asking them to contribute supplies or resources. When there was the occupation in Portland in 2018, they threatened a food cart that wouldn’t give them electricity access.
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) June 10, 2020
Day 1: "We have done it, Comrades! This time Socialism is finally working!!"
Day 2:"Homeless people stole all our food & we have a critical soy shortage" https://t.co/CHuE8pkyE1— Urbanski❌ (@KasimirUrbanski) June 10, 2020
Remember that Antifa is a violent revolutionary communist organization:
Antifa—real name: Antifaschisitsche Aktion—was born during the street-fights of the 1932 Weimar Republic. It was founded by the Stalinist Communist Party of Germany (KPD), although various Communist “anti-fascist defense” units were associated with the KPD much earlier.
Anti-fascist Action’s sole purpose was to help the KPD combat other political parties for control of the streets in the revolutionary politics of the rapidly failing Weimar Republic.
And yes, they fought the Nazis.
But they also fought liberal parties, conservative parties, and anyone and everyone who got in their way. While these early antecedents were short-lived, it is useful to view Antifa in this context. More than anything, Antifa exists to serve as a tool of revolutionary politics in a failed (or failing) state.
Antifa would reestablish itself in the early 1980s, also in Germany, out of Autonomism. Autonomism is an anti-authoritarian anarcho-Marxist ideology associated with the Communist urban guerilla organizations of 1970s and ’80s Europe like Red Army Faction and the Red Brigade. Autonomism would find a home among the young punks of Germany’s squatters’ rights movement. Around this time, Antifa tactics like the “black block,” where large numbers of rioters dress in black and move together in formation as part of a larger protest, were developed.
Antifa would form in a similar fashion in the United States, but under a different name.
According to Antifa lore, an effort by young punks to expel neo-Nazis and white supremacists from the music scene led to the formation of Anti-Racist Action (ARA), beginning in the Midwest and then spreading outward. As chapters formed in various cities, regional councils and networks were formed, such as the Midwest Anti-Fascist Network (MAFN) in 1995.
But present at the birth of ARA were members of America’s long-time revolutionary clique, with roots going all the way back to the domestic terror group Weather Underground. Consulting the young anti-racist punks in the formation of ARA were members of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee (JBAKC). Several separate ARAs would go on to form one of the largest Antifa networks in the country, Torch Antifa, whose website was registered by a former JBAKC member.
JBAKC was formed as a front for the May 19th Communist Organization (MCO), itself founded out of the remnants of the Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army, the FALN and other terrorist groups of the ’60s and ’70s. (May 19 was chosen since it was the birthday of both Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh.)
Following a split in the Weather Underground leadership over whether to emphasize class or racial struggle, the MCO emphasized working for “black liberation.” Members of the MCO were responsible for several bombings and robberies in the 1980s, including the infamous 1981 Brinks Armored Car Robbery.
(Hat tip: Powerline.)
The difference between 60s radicals and today’s radicals? Better funding, better organization, and deeper penetration into American institutions:
But there’s a difference, and it’s the leftism of a much larger segment of the American public, the willingness of virtually the entire MSM to voluntarily become Pravda, the courts’ desire to play along as well, the amount of money supporting the movement, and what I see as the increasing sophistication of the violent forces such as Antifa who are ready to exploit any and every incident that lends itself to it.
The 60s radicals were relative amateurs. These people, less so, at least in terms of organization. And we have not yet seen the worst of it.
A few more links about the current leftwing madness:
While it sounds great to attribute Floyd’s death to the racism built into the culture, what few are willing to do is analyze that culture. So why don’t we look into the system where this crime took place?
To start, you have as the city Mayor, Jacob Frey, an avowed leftist who follows a string of Democratic liberal leaders. The last time a Republican was elected to run the city was 1957. The police chief of Minneapolis is Medaria Arradondo, a black police official. The federal representative for the city, in Washington, is the famed female POC Ilhan Omar, and the top cop for the state is another POC and former head of the DNC, Attorney General Keith Ellison. Are these the leaders perpetuating the culture of white supremacy?
Just to add to the list, you have Minnesota headed by Democrat Tim Walz, the state is served by two Democrat senators, including Amy Klobuchar who spent years as an acting state attorney in a few offices, and even the sister city of Saint Paul has as its Mayor, Melvin Carter, another POC leader. These would be the people operating the ‘’racist and prejudicial system and culture’’. Looking over these names, note how few have incurred the wrath and blame over the past week, while President Trump has been pointed at as responsible.
This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.
In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
