These Obama/Trump Voters Are Just Trump Voters Now

It's Alexi McCammond, at Axios:

"He's proven what he's promised over and over to us."
Some Obama/Trump swing voters here are firmly in Trump’s camp now — and they're sick of impeachment.

The 2+ hour convo revealed major warning signs for the Dem Party in a crucial swing county. @axios https://t.co/QUqBcNTVsG

— Alexi McCammond (@alexi) December 16, 2019

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition: Guns, God, and Church Services

At the Los Angeles Times, "At a church security seminar: Guns, God and 'get those heads up' when you pray":

At a church security seminar: Guns, God and 'get those heads up' when you pray https://t.co/NIWtSJ6n49 pic.twitter.com/gK3a9goaQx

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) May 22, 2018

Just as the people in Mariners Church began to pull off their hats, bow their heads and close their eyes to pray, Jimmy Meeks snapped at them.

"Get those heads up!" said the pastor and retired Texas police officer.

Hadn't he just warned them that closing their eyes made them targets? Sheep in the presence of wolves.

"What's wrong with y'all?"

Their eyes duly peeled, he then led the crowd in a prayer.

"Wherever we are, Father, should the wolf cross our path, give us the wisdom to know what to do with that moment, and give us the power and the courage to act to stop the wolf and protect our sons and daughters."

Churchgoers, preachers and law enforcement officers from across Southern California had gathered for a church security seminar in Huntington Beach hosted by the California Rifle & Pistol Assn., which delivered a warning: Faith alone will not protect you in a house of God.

In the sleek sanctuary of Mariners Church, the mostly male crowd sipped coffee, jotted notes and punctured the air with shouts of "Amen!" and "Hooah!" as a series of out-of-town speakers at the Sheepdog Seminar encouraged them to be the ones who step up and protect others if, God forbid, an attacker comes.

In the months since a gunman in November killed 26 people at the First Baptist Church in rural Sutherland Springs, Texas, many people of faith have begun questioning how to keep religious institutions safe, said Rick Travis, executive director of the California Rifle & Pistol Assn. His organization has been inundated with requests for church security training and probably will be hosting events for the next several years, he said.

"We don't want people to be afraid," said Travis, a churchgoer himself. "We want people to be knowledgeable."

The seminar happened four days before a mass shooting at Santa Fe High School in Texas killed 10 people, mostly students, and reignited the never-ending debate over gun control, the 2nd Amendment and the place of firearms in American society.

Appearing on Sunday morning news programs, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said that teachers need to be armed. He said guns are not the problem.

"Guns stop crimes," he said on ABC's "This Week." "If we take the guns out of society — if you or anyone else thinks that that makes us safer, then I'm sad to say that you're mistaken. That will just give those that are evil … [the ability] to put more of us in danger."

Were the assembled at the church safety event being told to pack heat in the pews? Not always in so many words — and that wasn't the whole kit and caboodle of advice. But if you're legally able to carry a gun, the speakers said, it's best to do it.

"If you do not have an armed presence in your church, you are simply not ready," Meeks said...

James Damore at Portland State University

From Andy Ngo, at Quillette, "Damore, Diversity, and Disruption at PSU."

We invited @JamesADamore to speak about viewpoint diversity & his memo. Some were determined to shut us down. Full video: https://t.co/nmoWgMTmi7 #JamesDamorePSU pic.twitter.com/0BDdKf1K4a

— Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) February 26, 2018

We All Live on Campus Now

From Andrew Sullivan, a.k.a, "RawMuscleGlutes," at New York Magazine:

"The goal of our culture now is not the emancipation of the individual from the group, but the permanent definition of the individual by the group. We used to call this bigotry. Now we call it being woke."https://t.co/iHY9xqjNps via @intelligencer

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) February 9, 2018

Trump's Tax-Cut Triumph

The House has to vote again on the bill, but it looks like just a formality. This is a huge victory for the White House.

At Axios, "Trump triumphant: a consequential, lasting end to 2017" (via Memeorandum):

Trump triumphant: a consequential, lasting end to 2017 https://t.co/EmNlLJRN2M pic.twitter.com/o5ZV3BSTt1

— Axios (@axios) December 20, 2017

President Trump takes a beating in the media, but he's ending 2017 on the high note of his presidency.

The big picture: You might not like his words or actions. But measured in terms of what Republican voters want and expected, he's winning on important fronts:

* The tax bill passed with almost unanimous Republican support, before the end of the year, and in keeping with mostly mainstream conservative orthodoxy. Trump won a bigger corporate tax break than either Bush ever got, and will sign the most consequential new tax law in 30 years. And he followed through on cutting taxes for most small businesses and most Americans. He did this without losing a single GOP senator — even his harshest critics.

* He failed to repeal all of Obama's health-care law. But Trump axed the individual mandate with the tax bill, and has chipped away at other parts of the law's foundation. Again, you might hate the outcome. But it's a significant step to blowing up a program most Republicans demanded be destroyed.

* Axios health-care editor Sam Baker emails: "The smaller administrative steps Trump has taken — an executive order, cuts to enrollment outreach, ending a critical stream of funding for insurers — [are cumulatively] weakening the ACA's insurance exchanges and prompting some insurers to question whether those markets are worth the trouble."

* Trump has tilted the court rightward in lasting ways. Justice Neil Gorsuch was a substantial, conservative addition to the Supreme Court. And it wasn't a one-off: The dozen new U.S. Circuit Court judges he has named is the most during a president's first year in office in more than a century.

* Trump has followed through on eviscerating regulations, many of them imposed by Obama. He has revoked 67, and delayed or derailed more than 1,500 others.

* No matter that much of it is not of his doing, the economy has grown consistently under his watch.

* ISIS is in retreat. The N.Y. Times' Ross Douthat calls it "A War Trump Won."

More.

William Jacobson at Vassar College

This is from last month, but there was quite the controversy, naturally.

Here's William, at USA Today, "My pro-free speech views made me the target of a smear campaign at Vassar College."

My lecture against squeezing out free speech from colleges got me smeared. The students who smeared me got a safe space complete with coloring books and markers.

(More at Legal Insurrection.)

Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Never Believed Trump Would Help

At Politico, "Johnstown Never Believed Trump Would Help. They Still Love Him Anyway":

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — Pam Schilling is the reason Donald Trump is the president.

Schilling’s personal story is in poignant miniature the story of this area of western Pennsylvania as a whole—one of the long-forgotten, woebegone spots in the middle of the country that gave Trump his unexpected victory last fall. She grew up in nearby Nanty Glo, the daughter and granddaughter of coal miners. She once had a union job packing meat at a grocery store, and then had to settle for less money at Walmart. Now she’s 60 and retired, and last year, in April, as Trump’s shocking political ascent became impossible to ignore, Schilling’s 32-year-old son died of a heroin overdose. She found needles in the pockets of the clothes he wore to work in the mines before he got laid off.

Desperate for change, Schilling, like so many other once reliable Democrats in these parts, responded enthusiastically to what Trump was saying—building a wall on the Mexican border, repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, bringing back jobs in steel and coal. That’s what Trump told them. At a raucous rally in late October, right downtown in their minor-league hockey arena, he vowed to restore the mines and the mills that had been the lifeblood of the region until they started closing some 40 years ago, triggering the “American carnage” Trump would talk about in his inaugural address: massive population loss, shrinking tax rolls, communal hopelessness and ultimately a raging opioid epidemic. When Trump won, people here were ecstatic. But they’d heard generations of politicians make big promises before, and they were also impatient for him to deliver.

“Six months to a year,” catering company owner Joey Del Signore told me when we met days after the election. “A couple months,” retired nurse Maggie Frear said, before saying it might take a couple years. “He’s just got to follow through with what he said he was going to do,” Schilling said last November. Back then, there was an all-but-audible “or else.”

A year later, the local unemployment rate has ticked down, and activity in a few coal mines has ticked up. Beyond that, though, not much has changed—at least not for the better. Johnstown and the surrounding region are struggling in the same ways and for the same reasons. The drug problem is just as bad. “There’s nothing good in the area,” Schilling said the other day in her living room. “I don’t have anything good to say about anything in this area. It’s sad.” Even so, her backing for Trump is utterly undiminished: “I’m a supporter of him, 100 percent.”

What I heard from Schilling is overwhelmingly what I heard in my follow-up conversations with people here that I talked to last year as well. Over the course of three rainy, dreary days last week, I revisited and shook hands with the president’s base—that thirtysomething percent of the electorate who resolutely approve of the job he is doing, the segment of voters who share his view that the Russia investigation is a “witch hunt” that “has nothing to do with him,” and who applaud his judicial nominees and his determination to gut the federal regulatory apparatus. But what I wasn’t prepared for was how readily these same people had abandoned the contract he had made with them. Their satisfaction with Trump now seems untethered to the things they once said mattered to them the most.

“I don’t know that he has done a lot to help,” Frear told me. Last year, she said she wouldn’t vote for him again if he didn’t do what he said he was going to do. Last week, she matter-of-factly stated that she would. “Support Trump? Sure,” she said. “I like him.”

Keep reading.

Why Dems Aren't Winning Against Trump

At U.S. News and World Report, "You Can't Beat Something With Nothing":

The Democrats seem to enjoy gloating about the hot mess that is the Republican Party these days. Former GOP presidents warning the president about the people he surrounds himself with; sitting Republican U.S. senators calling the president unstable and unqualified; and a former GOP speaker of the house saying "there is no Republican Party. The president isn't a Republican." And Democrats' friends in the mainstream media have kindly created an echo chamber that makes them think that they are always right and the Republicans are a bunch of sexist, racist, whack jobs.

So why aren't they winning?

They must be longing for the halcyon days of the Obama election in 2008. They were so eager to lay all of America's troubles entirely at the feet of President George W. Bush: The Iraq War (which most of their party voted to support), Hurricane Katrina response (ignoring any involvement by Democratic local officials) and the financial collapse (which had little to do with Washington – although President Bush and President Barack Obama worked hand in hand to bail the country out of it). They were so full of hope! They were ushering in a new America. A post-racial America where everyone has health care and a good middle-class job. Stories written in the wake of the November election wrote the obituary on the Republican Party (too white, too rich, too old and on top of that, technology morons who can't turn out the vote). The Democrats were here to stay – or so they thought.

That arrogance caused them to nominate Hillary Clinton to be their party's standard bearer. Possibly the only candidate who could lose to Trump. (It's generally accepted that, had Vice President Joe Biden been the nominee, he would have won. And just this week, Trump's pollster posited that Sanders would have beaten Trump, too.) Her major primary opponent was a bit nutty, but that was largely because the Democratic establishment had crowned Clinton early on and crowded everyone else out. She was a fairly strong candidate in the Democratic Party: a well-known former first lady to a very popular president, former U.S. senator, former secretary of state. It was her turn.

Never mind that there is no figure in American politics as guaranteed to unite the GOP base in opposition as the person who coined the term "vast right-wing conspiracy" in an effort to deflect from her husband's misdeeds (which everyone in the country seemed to find plausible, except for her). Never mind her inability to connect with working-class voters in the same folksy way as her husband. Never mind her reputation for refusing to take responsibility for things that happened on her watch (like Benghazi). Everyone should ignore all that. Because it's time for us to shatter that glass ceiling, and no one but Hillary can do it.

The Democrats seemed shocked the race between Clinton and Trump remained relatively close because they seemed to stop talking to the white working-class voters who, for decades, had defined their base.

So when they lost the election, there was a reckoning. The leadership of the Democratic Party was drummed up and new, forward-looking leaders took the reins and offered an alternative to what they saw as the disaster of Donald Trump. Wait, no. That isn't what happened. Instead, they re-elected Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the house. They elected Chuck Schumer as Senate majority leader and completely sold out to the New York and California wings of the Democratic Party.

Instead of talking about middle-class tax cuts, they talked about transgender bathroom access. Instead of talking about fixing Obamacare, which was crushing many in the middle class with high premiums and complicated doctor selections, they walked right into the trap of the alt-right and began tearing down Civil War statues.

In the first big test of party strength: the Virginia governor's race, they have thrown up all over themselves. Virginia should be easy for them. Clinton won it in 2016. Trump's numbers are completely under water. The Republican candidate has awkwardly embraced Trump and some of his controversial positions while trying not to hug him too close. But somehow they ended up with one of the least inspiring Democratic candidates Virginia has seen in a long time. And they backed an ad that seemed to depict Virginians who drive pickup trucks as a bunch of rednecks looking to plow down children of color...

More.

Here the now-pulled Latino Victory Fund ad from the Virginia governor's race. For shame:

Trump Voters Are Still Optimistic

At the Irish Times, "Trump has made many Americans feel connected again: Trump – one year on: Those who voted for him are still optimistic – and in Erie, Pennsylvania, a former Obama stronghold, they would do so again":

Frank Victor sits at the head of the conference table at Fralo Industries, the high-tech sheet metal manufacturing plant in downtown Erie, Pennsylvania, he owns with his brother Mike – who is now the president of Mercyhurst University – a prestigious private Catholic university located within the city limits.

Across from him is John Bauman, the president of the manufacturing company and a minority owner. Both men are highly educated, successful businessmen who have left this city – which has arguably seen better days – throughout their careers, but returned to invest and be part of pushing its renewal.

A process both men admit will be long.

They both voted for Donald Trump last November and were part of the movement in Pennsylvania and across the Rust Belt that flipped traditional Democratic counties like Erie from Democrat to Republican; a flip which helped push Trump over the top to win the presidency.

And they would do it again.

“In a heartbeat,” said Victor, 54, as he gives a tour of his factory that employs 68 locals in well-paying jobs, something hard to come by in America’s Rust Belt.

Victor and Bauman are the type of American voters who were hiding in plain sight for the American news media and political strategists to see – but didn’t. Not because they weren’t available, not because they would not have admitted they were going to vote for him – but because much of the media and political class, both Democrat and Republican, could not understand why they would, so they didn’t ask.

Twelve months later they still don’t understand why they did.

In fact much of the US is still stuck in a singular moment in politics; for the most part it is still November 8th, 2016 around midnight. If you voted for Trump, you are still excited and still optimistic about his presidency. If you didn’t? You still believe it must be illegitimate; you either still believe the only reason Trump won was because of Russian interference or because former FBI director James Comey’s late actions cast doubt...

More.

Democrats: The Atheist Anti-American Feminist Gun-Grabber Man-Hating Party

At the Other McCain:

Democrats like Shannon Watts promote the idea that Bible-believing Christians are a greater threat to America than Koran-believing Muslims. Why? Because exit-poll data show that Bible-believing Christians tend to vote Republican, just like a majority of gun owners vote Republican, and most white people vote Republican. If you are a member of any demographic constituency that is aligned with the GOP, Democrats will find a way to demonize you as the epitome of evil, because scapegoating their enemies is what the Democrat Party is all about.

By the way, is anyone surprised that Shannon Watts’ daughter is gay? Aren’t Democrats now basically the anti-heterosexual party? America is still a free country, and you can say what you want, but they can take away my heterosexuality when they pry it from my cold dead hands.

Probably most Americans agree with me, but Democrats hate most Americans. They are fanatically devoted to hating us, and yet can’t seem to understand why we don’t vote for them. Let’s hope they never figure it out, because this is why Hillary Clinton is not president.

Identity Politics, Destroying America

From James A. Baker III and Andrew Young, at WSJ, "Identity Politics Are Tearing America Apart":

The two of us have seen this before: a critical point in U.S. history, when political, social and economic upheavals have left too many Americans battling one another rather than working together to build a better country. We lived through the Great Depression, when men armed with bats and clubs went to the streets in violent attempts to resolve labor differences. We also experienced the civil unrest of the 1960s, when inner cities burned with the heat of racial division and authorities killed innocent students peacefully protesting a war.

Somehow, the drumbeat of dissonance seems harsher today. America’s national ideal of “e pluribus unum”—out of many, one—threatens to become a hollow slogan. Jaded Americans are constantly confronted by a deluge of animus from their televisions and smartphones. The U.S. finds itself increasingly divided along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, religion and sexual identity. Countless demagogues stand ready to exploit those differences. When a sports reporter of Asian heritage is removed from his assignment because his name is close to that of a Confederate army general, political correctness has gone too far. Identity politics practiced by both major political parties is eroding a core principle that Americans are, first and foremost, Americans.

The divisions in society are real. So are national legacies of injustice. All can and must be addressed. Those who preach hatred should be called out for their odious beliefs. But even as extremism is condemned, Americans of good will need to keep up lines of civil, constructive conversation.

The country faces a stark choice. Its citizens can continue screaming at each other, sometimes over largely symbolic issues. Or they can again do what the citizens of this country have done best in the past—work together on the real problems that confront everyone.

Both of us have been at the center of heated disputes in this country and around the world. And there’s one thing we’ve learned over the decades: You achieve peace by talking, not yelling. The best way to resolve an argument is to find common ground.

We encourage Congress and the White House to take this approach in the fall. First, they should raise the debt ceiling and fund the government. There is no benefit to shutting down the government simply because one side does not get all it wants from the legislative process. A government shutdown would only fortify most people’s dissatisfaction with a federal government they (often correctly) believe doesn’t work for them. And it would only breed more debilitating cynicism.

We hope that leaders in Washington will also focus on infrastructure projects that can help the U.S. keep pace with its global competitors, particularly China. Floodwaters don’t distinguish between Republicans and Democrats. Nor do rotting bridges discriminate between whites and blacks. This is an important and easy area to emphasize common interests. Political leaders should prioritize and provide tangible policies that benefit Americans. They are long overdue.

We also encourage Washington to focus with laserlike intensity on the federal tax code, which handcuffs American businesses. This country needs to find politically palatable ways to streamline that code and bring corporate taxes in line with those of other countries. As a way to protect the debate from becoming a battle over whose ox gets gored, Congress should make any tax reform revenue-neutral. Legislation should also encourage investors to bring their money back into the U.S., where it can be put into civic projects that improve America.

Congress and the president must do more than just act on these pressing issues. They also need to set an example to all Americans...

Keep reading.

Leftists Shut Down Bay Area Free Speech Rallies

I don't know?

Folks keep saying the Democrats are forming a circular firing squad, but they keep shutting down free speech events. Will the great silent majority repudiate these brown shirts in 2018 and 2020. Most crucially, can Donald Trump be reelected to continue the fight against America's enemies?

I sure hope so.

Here's some updates from today's Los Angeles Times, "What will happen in the Bay Area? After San Francisco and Berkeley rallies scrapped, peace activists prepare." Also, "Organizer of far-right rally in San Francisco cancels Saturday news conference in park."

And of course, leftists were able to protest, "Hundreds of demonstrators turn out in San Francisco to denounce white supremacist."

For the truth of it all, see Matthew Vadum, at FrontPage Magazine, "THE PERSECUTION OF PATRIOT PRAYER: Democrats green-light violence by smearing mainstream group rallying in San Francisco as neo-Nazis":

Democrat politicians like Nancy Pelosi have given their ultra-violent “antifa” allies permission to use physical violence against the Patriot Prayer group rallying in a San Francisco park on Saturday by smearing them as “Nazi sympathizers.”

The story of Oregon-based Patriot Prayer is a case study in the power of propaganda in generating leftist mass hysteria. It is also a reaffirmation that everyone has First Amendment rights in America, except for non-leftists. Leftists are already planning riots. One of the more cowardly leftists intends to cover the rally site at Crissy Field inside San Francisco’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area near the Golden Gate Bridge in dog feces.

Offering no evidence whatsoever of the Tea Party-ish group’s background or intentions, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, who represents San Francisco, said Crissy Field "is not a place for Nazi sympathizers to come and spew their negative message."

Especially since Donald Trump became president, the Left has been deliberately, maliciously, conflating peaceful, pro-Constitution conservative and Tea Party groups with violent, statist neo-Nazis and those affiliated with them.

Pelosi has been bloviating about Patriot Prayer’s rally permit for some time, a permit granted only after the group agreed to ban guns, tiki torches, and other objects that can be used as weapons at the event.

Pelosi trashed the feds on August 15 for granting the permit, making the outrageously defamatory claim that Patriot Prayer is secretly a despicable hate group.

“The National Park Service’s decision to permit a white supremacist rally … raises grave and ongoing concerns about public safety,” the 77-year-old latte leftist said in a statement.

“Free speech does not grant the right to yell fire in a crowded theater, incite violence or endanger the public in any venue,” she said, going on to “wonder” whether the decision to allow the “white supremacist rally” was made “under guidance from the White House?” She also called into question the NPS’s ability “to ensure public safety during a white supremacist rally.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) wrote a letter earlier this month urging the NPS to deny Patriot Prayer a permit rally. “I am alarmed at the prospect that Crissy Field will be used as a venue for Patriot Prayer’s incitement, hate, and intimidation,” wrote the 84-year-old lawmaker who, for what it’s worth, at times seems like an ardent conservative compared to California’s junior senator, Kamala Harris (D).

Conspiracy theorist and congresswoman, Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), said the upcoming rally isn’t about free speech at all.

What they’re really doing is really manipulating. They have small numbers and small resources, and they see this is an opportunity to go to very blue areas where they will not be met with warmth and revelry and try to gin up more support for their organization with numbers and with monies.

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), a known Communist sympathizer, seemed to say she won’t be upset if a so-called alt-right event set for Sunday at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park is shut down.

“Berkeley is the center really of the free speech movement and the peace movement, Lee said. “And so there’s no way that we are not going to say we’re united against hate.”

Pelosi, Feinstein, Speier, Lee and their antifa comrades have been emboldened by Republican politicians like Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio and NeverTrump obsessives like Bill Kristol and Joe Scarborough who joined in the attacks on President Trump after the recent unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia, accusing him of treating the occasionally violent radical rightists as morally equivalent to the always-violent radical leftists.

Thanks to the lies of Pelosi and her colleagues, antifa is already threatening murder and mayhem at the rally.

Twitter user @ibPrinceJordan, who self-identifies as a San Francisco resident, tweeted, “The Patriot Prayer rally is a nazi white supremacist event. I’ll be their [sic] to crush some nazi skulls.”

“Can’t wait!” he added. “Going to bring this nailed bat for some nazi pounding.” That tweet was accompanied by a photo of what appeared to be a baseball bat with long nails driven through it.

Someone on Facebook calling himself Tuffy Tuffington is urging fellow dog owners to “leave a gift for our alt-right friends” by letting their dogs “do their business” at Crissy Field before the Patriot Prayer event.

“I just had this image of alt-right people stomping around in the poop,” Tuffington reportedly said. “It seemed like a little bit of civil disobedience where we didn’t have to engage with them face to face.”

The claim that Patriot Prayer is a so-called hate group is laughable. Not even the extreme left-wingers at the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose website is the go-to reference for aspiring left-wing terrorists wishing to maim and kill conservatives, label Patriot Prayer a hate group.

Nor is its leader, Joey Gibson, considered an extremist by the SPLC which officially supports denying First Amendment rights to anyone to the right of Noam Chomsky. Gibson started Patriot Prayer after several supporters of President Trump were beaten in San Jose, California, on the campaign trail.

Gibson told Fox News the approaching rally is based in “a philosophy about promoting love and peace but doing it in a way that’s respectful. It’s about building bridges.”

He said he wants to educate antifa supporters and “bring them out of the darkness.” Calling his rally white-supremacist in nature is “beyond insane.”

“Nancy Pelosi said it was a white supremacist rally so she could bring out extremists on the right and the left,” Gibson said. “She’s telling white supremacists to come into town.”

The street thugs of antifa-aligned By Any Means Necessary, which California law enforcement blames for inciting violence at protests, say they will be at the rally as a result of Pelosi’s statements.

“San Francisco is not going to be a huge problem (with hate groups) because we have a permit so we can control who can come in,” Gibson said, adding “If anybody shows up with a flag or uses hateful rhetoric they can go stand out with antifa.”

“The politicians like Nancy Pelosi don’t like people coming in talking about freedom,” said Gibson. “At the end of the day they don’t care about racism. They want a revolution in the country.”

Making the case that Gibson, who isn’t Caucasian – he describes himself as “brown” – is some kind of white-supremacist is a hard case to make. The SPLC actually reported that Gibson was observed at a recent rally yelling “Fuck white supremacists!” He has been pepper-sprayed by leftists.

Tucker Carlson and Gibson shared some laughs about the bizarre allegations against him and his group during a TV interview aired August 16.

Previewing the San Francisco rally, Gibson said:

I'm not white. We have about eight speakers and only one speaker is white. We have a couple black speakers, a Hispanic, we have a transsexual speaker, we have a woman speaker. It's very diverse. It’s really just about what’s on the inside. What you believe, your heart, your soul. It has nothing to do with skin color.

Lindsay Grathwohl, daughter of the late American hero Larry Grathwohl, is scheduled to address the rally. Her father was a highly decorated Vietnam War veteran. After fighting Communists abroad, he decided to fight them at home as an FBI informant. He returned to America after serving in the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division and took it upon himself to infiltrate the group, joining the Weatherman collective in Cincinnati.

Gibson accused Pelosi of “trying to capitalize” on the current polarized political environment in the nation.

She's making it more difficult for San Francisco. What she’s trying to do is rile up her citizens so that they’ll come down there and they’ll try to chase us out. Her rhetoric is just going to cause more violence.

Patriot Prayer’s Facebook cover page depicts a peaceful rally. Above the group’s logo is a Nazi swastika covered by a red circle and diagonally crossed out. There is also a hammer and sickle symbol covered with a red circle and crossed out. A woman is shown wearing a shirt emblazoned with the "Don't tread on me" logo from the American Revolution. She is also wearing an "I voted" sticker.

Patriot Prayer makes it clear that certain individuals and kinds of people are not welcome at its rally this weekend.

No extremists will be allowed in. No Nazis, Communist, KKK, Antifa, white supremacist, I.E., or white nationalists. This is an opportunity for moderate americans to come in with opposing views. We will not allow the extremists to tear apart this country. Specifically, Richard Spencer and NathanDamigo will not be welcome.

Despite these assurances, it seems clear that the fascist Left and its army of rioters will be on hand, just as they were last weekend in Boston.

Antifa and others on the Left deprived members of another innocuous group of their free speech rights last weekend in Boston with the connivance of the authorities.

As Jeff Jacoby noted,

Participants in the "Boston Free Speech Rally" had been demonized as a troupe of neo-Nazis prepared to reprise the horror that had erupted in Charlottesville. They turned out to be a couple dozen courteous people linked by little more than a commitment to — surprise! — free speech.

One of the organizers of the event last Saturday on Boston Common was “a 23-year-old libertarian named John Medlar, [who] had insisted vigorously that its purpose was not to endorse white supremacy.” As Shiva Ayyadurai, an Indian immigrant seeking the GOP nomination in next year's U.S. Senate race, addressed the small crowd of free speech advocates, his supporters held up signs reading "Black Lives Do Matter."

One line in a news report on Page 1 of the left-leaning Boston Globe demonstrated how ridiculous the hype was: "'Excuse me,' one man in the counter-protest innocently asked a Globe reporter. 'Where are the white supremacists?'"

The event was doomed before it began. Mayor Marty Walsh (D) smeared the organizers as violent racists and extremists and rumors spread. "Boston does not want you here," he said.

This all-American micro-rally was confronted by 40,000 counter-protesters, including violent antifa members. But the people there for the free speech event were denied their First Amendment rights by Boston authorities.

The speakers on the Common bandstand were kept from being heard. They were blocked off with a 225-foot buffer zone, and segregated beyond earshot. Police barred anyone from approaching to hear what the rally speakers had to say. Reporters were excluded, too.

Result: The free-speech rally took place in a virtual cone of silence. Its participants "spoke essentially to themselves for about 50 minutes," the Globe reported. "If any of them said anything provocative, the massive crowd did not hear it."

Police Commissioner Bill Evans was fine with suppressing the rights of the participants who had a permit for the event, implying it was a gathering of neo-Nazis. "You know what," Evans said, "if they didn't get in, that's a good thing, because their message isn't what we want to hear."

The lunatic leftists of San Francisco are also hoping to snuff out the First Amendment rights of Patriot Prayer supporters tomorrow.

Predictably, San Francisco’s hyper-politically correct mayor, Ed Lee (D), has denounced the scheduled rally for, in his words, being designed to “incite hate, bigotry and violence” despite a complete lack of evidence that it is being held to promote hate, bigotry, or violence.

“They will have their rally on federal land because the U.S. Constitution provides all of us the right to freedom of expression,” Lee huffed. “But as mayor of this city, I say: Any message of hate is not welcome.”

Welcome or not, the patriots of Patriot Prayer are coming to San Francisco.

Hysteria Over Monuments Metastasizes

Leftist hysteria is like a cancer, so it's spread is tantamount to metastasis of cancer.

At the New York Times, "Far From Dixie, Outcry Grows Over a Wider Array of Monuments" (safe link):

It began with calls to remove Confederate generals.

But since the violence in Charlottesville, Va., two weeks ago, the anger from the left over monuments and public images deemed racist, insensitive or inappropriate has quickly spread to statues of Christopher Columbus and the former Philadelphia tough cop mayor Frank Rizzo, Boston’s landmark Faneuil Hall, a popular Chicago thoroughfare and even Maryland’s state song. An Asian-American sportscaster named Robert Lee was pulled from broadcasting a University of Virginia football game so as not to offend viewers.

The disputes over America’s racial past and public symbols have proliferated with dizzying speed, spreading to states far beyond the Confederacy and inspiring campaigns by minorities and political progressives across the country. But along the way, they have become to some an example of politically correct sentiments gone too far, with the potential to mobilize the right and alienate the center.

Paul Begala, the Democratic strategist, said his party was “driving straight into a trap Trump has set,” because the president seeks to shift the focus away from comments he made about white supremacists to his charge that opponents are trying to “take away our history.”

“While I understand the pain those monuments cause,” said Mr. Begala, who was an adviser to President Bill Clinton, “I just think it in some ways dishonors the debate to allow Trump to hijack it.”

New disputes seem to be springing up daily.

In a Democratic mayoral candidates’ debate in New York on Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio did not rule out removing Manhattan’s 76-foot Columbus Circle monument as the city reviews “symbols of hate.”

Philadelphia placed barricades and guards around a statue of Mr. Rizzo, loathed by some African-Americans for his harsh tactics toward blacks in the city, after protesters surrounded the bronze edifice and a city councilwoman, Helen Gym, wrote on Twitter, “Take the Rizzo statue down.”

Mr. Rizzo, who died in 1991, cultivated a law-and-order image as a police commissioner that included raiding gay clubs and once forcing Black Panthers to strip naked in the street.

“Just because Philadelphia wasn’t a part of the Confederacy doesn’t mean we get a pass,” Ms. Gym said in an interview. She is less concerned about turning off voters who support the president than in rousing members of the Democratic base, including minorities, who did not vote in November.

“My concern is about the number of people who stayed home, who felt government doesn’t speak for them,” she said. “I’m trying to show government can be reflective in a time of anguish.”

In Chicago, a campaign is underway to remove a monument to Italo Balbo, an Italian air marshal, which the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini presented to the city in 1933. Balbo Drive is a well-known street in the heart of downtown.

In Boston, there are calls for renaming historic Faneuil Hall because Peter Faneuil, who donated the building to the city in 1743, was a slave owner and trader.

Columbus, who, most Americans learn rather innocently, in 1492 sailed the ocean blue until he discovered the New World, has undergone a revisionist treatment in recent decades because of his impact on native peoples...

See that?

It's all about "rousing the Democratic base." Or, it's all about politics.

Leftists care about power. They don't care about the well-being of any of the so-called victims of "racism." They care about raw power and they'll destroy the country --- totally destroy this once-great nation --- in order to get it.

Still more (FWIW).

Safe Spaces and 'Ze' Badges at College (What a Total Nightmare)

From Maddy Kearns, at the Spectator U.K., "Safe spaces and ‘ze’ badges: My bewildering year at a U.S. university: Fear of causing offence on campus is stifling free thought – as I’ve found to my cost" (cached):

This week's cover: Campus tyranny pic.twitter.com/K9nsg8Ofbb

— The Spectator (@spectator) August 23, 2017

As a child in Glasgow, I learned that sticks and stones might break my bones but words didn’t really hurt. I’m now at New York University studying journalism, where a different mantra seems to apply. Words, it turns out, might cause life-ruining emotional trauma.

During my ‘Welcome Week’, for example, I was presented with a choice of badges indicating my preferred gender pronouns: ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’ or ‘ze’?

The student in front of me, an Australian, found this hilarious: ‘Last time I checked, I was a girl.’ Her joke was met with stony silence. Later I realised why: expressing bewilderment at the obsession with pronouns might count as a ‘micro-aggression’. Next stop, ‘transphobia’.

It was soon obvious to my fellow students that I was not quite with the programme. In a class discussion early in my first semester, I made the mistake of mentioning that I believed in objective standards in art. Some art is great, some isn’t, I said; not all artists are equally talented. This was deemed an undemocratic opinion and I was given a nickname: the cultural fascist. I’ve tried to take it affectionately.

After a year on campus, on a course entitled ‘Cultural Reporting and Criticism’, I still feel unable to speak freely, let alone critically. Although it doesn’t apply to my own course, friends have told me about ‘trigger warnings’ that caution they are about to be exposed to certain ideas; the threat of micro-aggressions (i.e. unintended insults) makes frank discourse impossible. Then there is the infamous ‘safe space’ — a massage-circle, Play-Doh-making haven — where students are protected from offence (and, therefore, intellectual challenge).

During class discussions, I’ve learned to discreetly scan my classmates’ faces for signs that they might be fellow free-thinkers. A slight head tilt at the mention of Islamophobia, a gentle questioning of what exactly is meant by ‘toxic masculinity’. I was thrilled to see a scribbled note — ‘This is utter shit’ — on someone’s copy of one of the reading requirements, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (an introduction to queer theory). In this way, I found the members of my secret non-conformist book club.

We met in a disused convent in Hell’s Kitchen and discussed campus-censored ideas. We read Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe, Laura Kipnis’s Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus and Walter Benn Michaels’s The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. We were a diverse group: a Catholic woman, a black conservative man, an anti-theist neoconservative, a Protestant libertarian, and a quick-witted Spanish contrarian. We were united in agreeing that we should be free to disagree. We made our own unsafe space, and at the end of each meeting, we were invigorated and parted on good terms.

It seemed to the members of my book club that academia is losing its way. It is riddled with paradox: safe spaces which are dangerously insular; the idea of ‘no absolutes’ (as an absolute); aggressive intolerance for anything perceived as intolerant; and censorship of ideas deemed too offensive for expression. It’s a form of totalitarianism and it’s beginning to infect British universities, too.

The morning after the US election, New York was bluer than ever. My classmates were in tears, including one professor. Protesters chanting ‘Not my President’ took to the streets as cries of ‘How did this happen?’ ‘What will we tell our children?’ and ‘What a terrible day for [insert identity group]!’ echoed down NYU’s hallways.

Two weeks later, I spent a slightly surreal Thanksgiving with my friend’s family in the DC area. My friend’s father is the former Republican senator and twice presidential candidate Rick Santorum. As I stuffed my face with turkey, I couldn’t believe my luck. Santorum’s insights into the new administration were as close to an insider’s scoop as any student journalist could hope for.

I was sure that, despite their differences in outlook, my classmates would be fascinated to hear about what he had to say. But before I had mustered the courage to share my experience, I received the following email from a professor: ‘Dear all, hope you are all recovering well from any encounters with Trump-supporting relatives over Thanksgiving. I should be all right myself in a day or so.’ Naturally, when this professor asked me, ‘How was your first Thanksgiving?’ I chose to speak exclusively about marshmallow yams.

This is daft, certainly. Even funny, in a macabre way. But it also raises a serious point: the university experience in America is now not one that will adequately prepare students for real life. In real-life democracy, people disagree — and normally they don’t die or suffer emotional injury because of it. In normal life, there’s no reason not to like someone with whom you disagree politically. On campus, opinions are often ontology: you are what you think. But this is dangerous logic: if I hate what you think, I must hate what you are...

Still more.

And welcome to my world, Ms. Maddy, my leftist campus nightmare. (I'm going back to my campus nightmare tomorrow, with our school's "College Days" return orientation and department meetings, oh joy.)

Lauren Southern on Removal of Confederate Statues (VIDEO)

Here's Ms. Lauren on the hysteria over the "racist" Confederate statues.

Democrat 'Nazi Hunters' Gone Wild

You gotta read this.

R.S. McCain has the post, "Robert Tracinski Kills It," linking to an article entitled "Nazi-Hunting Fantasies Have Unhinged the Left."

This Nazi-hunting hysteria's going to turn out badly for the hard-left Democrats, as it shows them to be bankrupt --- morally, politically, philosophically bankrupt. When you have to attack everyone as a Nazi no one's a Nazi, and that doesn't reflect well on the historical memory of those who perished in the Holocaust. See, for example, Matt Vespa, at Town Hall, via Memeorandum, "Howard Dean: If You Vote Republican in 2018, You're a Racist."

Mizzou Enrollment Plunges

I wonder why?

At Instapundit, "HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Mizzou suffering brutal long-term impacts of 2015 protests."

And from Jillian Kay Melchior, at WSJ, "Mizzou Pays a Price for Appeasing the Left":

Timothy Vaughn dutifully cheered the University of Missouri for a decade, sitting in the stands with his swag, two hot dogs and a Diet Coke. He estimates he attended between 60 and 85 athletic events every year—football and basketball games and even tennis matches and gymnastics meets. But after the infamous protests of fall 2015, Missouri lost this die-hard fan.

“I pledge from this day forward NOT TO contribute to the [Tiger Scholarship Fund], buy any tickets to any University of Missouri athletic event, to attend any athletic event (even if free), to give away all my MU clothes (nearly my entire wardrobe) after I have removed any logos associated with the University of Missouri, and any cards/helmets/ice buckets/flags with the University of Missouri logo on it,” Mr. Vaughn told administrators in an email four semesters ago.

He was not alone. Thousands of pages of emails I obtained through the Missouri Freedom of Information Act show that many alumni and other supporters were disgusted with administrators’ feeble response to the disruptions. Like Mr. Vaughn, many promised they’d stop attending athletic events. Others vowed they’d never send their children or grandchildren to the university. It now appears many of them have made good on those promises.

The commotion began in October 2015, when student activists claiming that “racism lives here” sent administrators a lengthy list of demands. Among them: The president of the University of Missouri system should resign after delivering a handwritten apology acknowledging his “white male privilege”; the curriculum should include “comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion” training; and 10% of the faculty and staff should be black.

Two weeks later, a student announced he was going on a hunger strike, and the football team refused to practice or play until the university met the demands. As protesters occupied the quad, administrators bent over backward to accommodate them, even providing a power strip so they could charge phones and a generator so they could camp in comfort. A communications instructor, Melissa Click, appeared on viral video calling for “muscle” to remove a student reporter from the quad. By Nov. 9, both the president and the chancellor of Mizzou, as the flagship Columbia campus is known, had resigned.

Donors, parents, alumni, sports fans and prospective students raged against the administration’s caving in. “At breakfast this morning, my wife and I agreed that MU is NOT a school we would even consider for our three children,” wrote Victor Wirtz, a 1978 alum, adding that the university “has devolved into the Berkeley of the Midwest.”

"Berkeley of the Midwest." Ouch.

Still more.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on 'Confederate'

I don't care one way or the other about HBO's possibly upcoming show, "Confederate." To be honest, I'd probably watch just like I've watched "True Detective" and "Westworld," to say nothing of "Game of Thrones." HBO's shows are the only ones I really like, except "Homeland" on Showtime. Other than that, I mostly watch sports. I quit watching cable news earlier this year, and I rarely watch "CBS This Morning" like I used to. Everything's political and I don't want my whole life to be one big attack on President Trump. I have to teach this stuff for a living.

So, if you've been reading news online this past week or so, you've probably heard about the controversy over "Confederate," which hasn't even been produced yet. But just the fact that David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, the creators of "Game of Thrones," are developing the project sent race-baiting leftist into fits.

In any case, here's "black body" boy, Ta-Nehisi Coates, at the Atlantic, "The Lost Cause Rides Again."

But see Kyle Smith, at National Review, "'Confederate' and the Dunces Who Assume It’s Pro-Slavery."

Why Ohio Just Gave Donald Trump a Hero's Welcome

From Salena Zito, at the New York Post:

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — This town was on fire.

By 1 in the afternoon on Tuesday, every main thoroughfare downtown was filled with happy people heading toward the Covelli Centre. Folks dressed in red, white and blue crisscrossed the main grids as vendors sold “Make America Great Again” ball caps, American flags and bottles of water.

Thousands had filled the gravel parking lot to wait until the doors opened at 4, license plates revealing they had traveled from as far as Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania and West Virginia to see the president speak directly to them in this Rust Belt city.

Music played on almost every corner as Donald Skowron, a retired Youngstown police officer, drove his green pickup truck up and down Champion Street — in the back, a 6-by-8-foot homemade wooden Trump-Pence sign straddling the bed of the truck, with two large Trump flags flowing from the top.

“I am very happy with the president’s performance so far,” said Skowron. “He has set the exact tone I was looking for, although I’ll be honest, I wish he didn’t tweet all of the time, but that is hardly anything to complain.”

Skowron said he is encouraged by reading about Trump’s constant meetings with industry leaders as well as union and trade members in trying to understand how to create jobs: “We have a president invested in trying to navigate between the people who create jobs and the men and women doing the jobs and how repealing regulations help both.”

Six months after Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States, he received a hero’s welcome in this town. The festive scene made a counter-visual to the daily nonstop press reports about investigations into members of his inner circle, Russian interference in last year’s election and the debate over ObamaCare.

Trump’s approval rating, according to Gallup, is 39 percent. Youngstown is the 39 percent.

On Monday, police said the advance ticket request of over 20,000 had exceeded the 6,000-seat capacity of the center, prompting the event coordinators to put a large screen outside the center for the overflow crowd...

Keep reading.

One-Time Cost of the Border Wall

Via Cousin Odie, at Woodsterman's, "L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-Libtard."