Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Like men who saw the scroll of #MeToo testimonies & interrogated women, asking “Is it really that bad?,” the shock of Floyd’s death is itself a barometer of inequality, evidence of who has moved through life free of the burden of such terrible knowledge. https://t.co/7Ci2bv3ToO
Kate Linthicum of the L.A. Times is a partisan advocate campaigning through her "journalism" for open borders and unlimited access for the so-called "refugees" of the illegal immigrant caravan.
And below, Newt Gringrich's recent op-ed at Fox News and a raw video of the recent migrant siege of the Mexico border, via Ruptly:
“All my life is there, waiting for me,” said a migrant who was deported a month ago from Phoenix. “I miss my Playstation. I miss Buffalo Wild Wings. I miss my car.”https://t.co/MdlDFLHuO9
The United States is much better off without Michael Flynn serving as national security adviser. But no one should be cheering the way he was brought down.
The whole episode is evidence of the precipitous and ongoing collapse of America's democratic institutions — not a sign of their resiliency. Flynn's ouster was a soft coup (or political assassination) engineered by anonymous intelligence community bureaucrats. The results might be salutary, but this isn't the way a liberal democracy is supposed to function.
Unelected intelligence analysts work for the president, not the other way around. Far too many Trump critics appear not to care that these intelligence agents leaked highly sensitive information to the press — mostly because Trump critics are pleased with the result. "Finally," they say, "someone took a stand to expose collusion between the Russians and a senior aide to the president!" It is indeed important that someone took such a stand. But it matters greatly who that someone is and how they take their stand. Members of the unelected, unaccountable intelligence community are not the right someone, especially when they target a senior aide to the president by leaking anonymously to newspapers the content of classified phone intercepts, where the unverified, unsubstantiated information can inflict politically fatal damage almost instantaneously...
I normally wouldn't describe things as a "crisis," but one of the pieces I read yesterday noted that it wasn't just Michael Flynn. Democrats are out for blood. The leftist media is agitating and organizing to destroy the administration. It's a coup. Next on the chopping block is Kellyanne Conway. Then Reince Priebus. After that it's President Trump himself. Impeachment talk will escalate.
Of course, there's literally no evidence that U.S. security has been comprised. Leftists are just picking up where they left off during the transition. They're bringing back the "Russian card" to annihilate the newly sworn-in administration. They couldn't defeat the insurgent populist Trump in the election, so they'll use extra-electoral means. They're going to use extra-constitutional means, in fact, because the opposition to Trump is looking like an armed revolt. It's a rebellion. Street protests and anarchist violence are cheered by the progs in D.C. Campuses are the training grounds of the revolution. Far-left members of Congress demonize and delegitimize the elected government at every turn. Nancy Pelosi's Robespierre in a skirt.
It hits really close to home, which of course is the plan.
I hesitate to link Rolling Stone, but compared to the MSM newspaper reviews, it's more accurate:
Despite the left-leaning ideology embedded into the series' DNA, it's still a bit of a political Rorschach test: You can look at [Joseph Julian] Soria's [hard-working Mexican immigrant] hero as an example of pro-immigration tendencies, and see the roving packs of Euro "murder tourists" as pandering to the xenophobic crowd ("Foreigners coming to our country," intones a news reporter, "to kill!"). And for all of its protagonists' anti-Purge liberalism, the story sure gives a lot of ammo to the pro-Second Amendment, "the only way to handle a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with gun" crowd.
Rather, the film's real currency is simply a nonpartisan free-floating us-vs-them anger, in which a put-upon underclass finally gets payback and a one-percenter upper class finally gets its comeuppance. You can be a pissed-off Tea Partier or an Occupy advocate and find something here to stoke your fat cat hatred; either way, catharsis is doled out not in a dusk-til-dawn homicidal free-for all but two harmless hours in a theater. Election Year's only real stance — besides be sure to vote in November — is that America is violence. God bless the U.S.A. God save us all...
It's indeed leftist in its DNA, but there's a vector of ideological story lines, overlapping with more crystallized good vs. bad trajectories, and I found myself working out the real-life possibilities raised by the film. Most realistic "it could happen here" is the street-level race-war the propels most of the purging violence that's the background to the election year ideological story. You have good and bad minority antagonists, and one of the best scenes of the criminal urban purging is when Laney (the triage ambulance driver) blows away the entitled black-bitch thug with a shotgun blast to the face. That was gloriously freakin' satisfying!
That said, I was disappointed in the overly simplistic Nazification of the horrible, terrible no-good right-wingers (and their idiotic paint-by-the numbers neo-Nazi mercenary militiamen). For a moment I thought we'd have some real, truthful moral equivalence, when the far-left urban army is about to assassinate the right-wing presidential candidate backed by the NFFA (the New Founding Fathers of America). But since that story line gets cut short, the movie reverts back to the default good vs. evil leftists memes, with Roan, the leftist presidential candidate, affecting a Jesus-like "don't do it or we'll be no better than they are" routine.
You get the picture without me giving away too much more of the story. No matter what, it's a fun flick. Someone should do a remake with the ideological bad guy roles reversed, just to piss off the cultural intelligentsia of the mainstream media juggernaut.
The end is nigh in “The Purge: Election Year.” Not the end of the world as we know it (another apocalypse? Ho-hum), but possibly the end of the Purge itself — that cruel annual rite that, for one night only, allows all Americans to vent their bloodlust in the name of continued national health and prosperity. Pitting a heroic female presidential hopeful against a shadowy cabal of gun-toting one-percenters, this is a crudely opportunistic, engrossingly pulpy extension of a franchise that, as ludicrous as its setup has always been, seems increasingly in step with the violent absurdity of the times. That much is clear from the new movie’s cutthroat political rhetoric, as well as a ghastly scene of a church being peppered with bullets.
An image like that can’t help but give you pause, as it was clearly designed to do. Even more than in the series’ first two films, the writer-director James DeMonaco wields his satirical ideas and topical reference points with a recklessness that similarly informs his murkily shot scenes of knife-to-knife combat and sniper fire. At times the experience of watching “Election Year” is a bit like scanning a few years’ worth of alarming headlines while someone sets off firecrackers under your desk. Black Lives Matter, drone warfare, local protests, home-grown militias, predatory capitalism, the Florida electorate, pop pop, bang bang.
In this frenzied B-thriller context, where thinking too much could easily get you killed, a hit-or-miss approach works better than you might expect. What once seemed like design weaknesses in DeMonaco’s speculative fiction — the willful incoherence of his allegory and the scattershot quality of his satire — now feel like a natural extension of his schlock-and-awe sensibility. He isn’t concocting an alternate reality so much as sending out crazy dispatches from our own, and he knows that a jab doesn’t have to be subtle in order to land...
President Barack Obama is hoping there’s no Willie Horton among the 6,000 inmates being released early from federal prison.
Reducing the prison population is a key part of Obama’s push for criminal justice reform in his last year as president. He sees it as a way to repair broken communities and spare taxpayers the cost of housing low-level criminals. A bipartisan coalition in Congress is on board, too.
But the mass release set to be completed Monday will test the resolve of this new consensus heading into an election year. The infamous Willie Horton ad is on the minds of activists on both sides: They haven’t forgotten how the grainy, black-and-white mug shot of a bearded black man helped sink Michael Dukakis’ 1988 presidential campaign. As Massachusetts governor, “he allowed first-degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison,” said a voice-over, before describing how Horton kidnapped a couple and raped the woman while out on furlough.
The people released from Friday through Monday are not first-degree murderers — they’re low-level drug offenders, and almost a third are immigrants just headed for a different, predeportation detention — but opponents of sentencing reform are already looking for the next Horton.
“We’re fooling the public when we tell them we’re releasing nonviolent drug offenders,” said Steven Cook, head of the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys, who says downward trends in crime are thanks to the current system of tough sentences...
This is not good. "Non-violent criminals" are a leftist media myth.
Crime's already going up with the Black Lives Matter's "Ferguson effect." It's going up more. A lot more.
#BlackLivesMatter "Professor" Deray Mckesson maintains looting serves social and racial justice.
Looting is a great way to advance the increasingly violent, racist Black Lives Matter movement, an agitator is teaching students after being rewarded by the Left with a teaching gig at prestigious Yale University.
The words of Twitter star Deray Mckesson expose for the umpteenth time the lie that Black Lives Matter, whose members idolize unrepentant cop killers Mumia abu Jamal and Assata Shakur, is a law-abiding, peaceful movement and that those who loot and riot in its name are a fringe or unrelated element. Lawless violence and bloody insurrection are how Mckesson and his followers pursue their vision of so-called social justice.
Mckesson led a class that was discussing, "In Defense of Looting," an essay by Willie Osterweil whose bio at the New Inquiry website describes him as "a writer, editor, and member of the punk band Vulture Shit."
Johnetta Elzie (who calls herself ShordeeDooWhop on Twitter and uses the handle @Nettaaaaaaaa), who with Mckesson helped foment unrest in Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and other racial hotspots, live-tweeted the Oct. 3 lecture. The tweets suggest the talk was a mixture of black liberation theology, critical race theory, Marxism, and anarchism...
