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!
Robert Mueller, in his current state, should not have been allowed to supervise the Russia collusion investigation. But the greater question is, how long has Robert Mueller been like this?
The regulation on the appointment of a Special Counsel provides that the person named as the Special Counsel “shall be a lawyer with a reputation for integrity and impartial decision making, and with appropriate experience to ensure both that the investigation will be conducted ably, expeditiously and thoroughly, and that investigative and prosecutorial decisions will be supported by an informed understanding of the criminal law and Department of Justice policies. The Special Counsel shall be selected from outside the United States Government.” The regulation further provides that the Special Counsel’s responsibilities “shall take first precedence in their professional lives, and that it may be necessary to devote their full time to the investigation, depending on its complexity and the stage of the investigation.”
On July 24, 2019, Democrats staged vivid and irrefutable proof that the appointment of Robert Mueller came to violate these principles. Watching even a few minutes of the hearing testimony, it swiftly became apparent that the stammering and confused Robert Mueller lacked even a basic understanding of the underlying facts of the Russia collusion investigation.
How, for example, could anyone following the story not be familiar with Fusion GPS? It was clear that Mueller didn’t write the report as he seemed to read for the first time excerpts cited by interrogators. He didn’t know what was and was not in the report. He didn’t write his letter to AG Barr complaining about Barr’s summary of the underlying conclusions. He didn’t write his script in the May 2019 press conference. Mueller can’t keep his story straight about whether he would have indicted the president but for the Justice Department Policy prohibiting the indictment of a sitting president. He didn’t even know that one of his top attorneys who headed up the Papadopoulos investigation (Jeannie Rhee) actually represented Hillary Clinton in litigation over emails.
So I’ll ask this again: How long has he been like this? ...
They are both Democrats: Joe Biden, the 76-year-old former Vice President, and Ilhan Omar, the 36-year-old freshman Congresswoman. An old white man, with blind spots on race and gender and a penchant for bipartisanship; a young Somali-American Muslim who sees compromise as complicity. To Biden, Donald Trump is an aberration; to Omar, he is a symptom of a deeper rot. One argues for a return to normality, while the other insists: Your normal has always been my oppression.
How to fit those two visions into one party is the question tying the Democrats in knots. What policies will the party champion? Which voters will it court? How will it speak to an angry and divided nation? While intraparty tussles are perennial in politics, this one comes against a unique backdrop: an unpopular, mendacious, norm-trampling President. As Democrats grilled Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, on July 24, their sense of urgency was evident.
The one thing Democrats agree on is that Trump needs to go, but even on the question of how to oust him, they are split. Ninety-five of the party’s 235 House Representatives recently voted to begin impeachment proceedings, a measure nearly a dozen of the major Democratic presidential candidates support. The party’s leadership continues to insist that defeating the President in 2020 is the better path. Half the party seems furious at Speaker Nancy Pelosi for not attacking Trump more forcefully, while the other is petrified they’re losing the American mainstream, validating Trump’s “witch hunt” accusations with investigations into Russian election interference that most voters see as irrelevant to their daily lives.
These divisions have come into focus in recent weeks. Two parallel conflicts–the fight among congressional Democrats, and debates among the 2020 candidates–have played out along similar lines, revealing deep fissures on policy, tactics and identity. A consistent majority of voters disapprove of the President’s performance, do not want him re-elected and dislike his policies and character. Even Trump’s allies admit his re-election hopes rest on his ability to make the alternative even more distasteful.
But for an opposition party, it’s never as simple as pointing out the failures of those in power. As desperate as Democrats are to defeat Trump, voters demand an alternative vision. “You will not win an election telling everybody how bad Donald Trump is,” former Senate majority leader Harry Reid tells TIME. “They have to run on what they’re going to do.”
The Democrats’ crossroads is also America’s. As Trump leans into themes of division, with racist appeals, detention camps for migrants and an exclusionary vision of national identity, the 2020 election is shaping up as a referendum on what the country’s citizens want it to become. This is not who we are as a nation, Trump’s opponents are fond of saying. But if not, what should we be instead?
“That little girl was me.” With this five-word statement at the Democrats’ June 27 debate in Miami, Senator Kamala Harris did not just strike a blow against Biden. She showed where the party’s most sensitive sore spots lie.
Harris explained that she had been bused to her Berkeley, Calif., public school as part of an integration plan; Biden, as a Delaware Senator, had worked to stop the federal government from forcing busing on school districts that resisted integration. On the campaign trail this year, Biden had boasted about being able to work with political opponents, citing his chumminess with Senators who were racists and segregationists. “It was hurtful,” Harris said, “to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States Senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country.”
It was a powerful appeal, drawn from the personal experience of a woman of color whose life’s course was altered by the public-policy choices made in the halls of power. What was exposed wasn’t so much a real policy difference–after the debate, Harris took essentially the same position as Biden against mandatory busing in today’s still segregated schools–but a dispute about perspective. Biden, clearly ruffled, became defensive and eventually gave up, cutting himself off midsentence: “My time is up.” Biden remains the front runner, but the line had the ring of a campaign epitaph.
Presidential primaries are always the battleground for political parties’ competing factions, and some of the debates Democrats are enmeshed in now are ones they’ve been having for decades. Swing to the left, or tack to the middle? Galvanize the base, or cultivate the center? Tear down the system, or work to improve it? These familiar questions are now shadowed by the specter of Trump and his movement. If Americans are to reject Trumpist nationalism and white identity politics, what’s their alternative?
With two dozen presidential candidates and the race only just begun, the majority of Democratic voters say they are undecided. But a top tier of five candidates has emerged as the focus of voters’ attention: Biden, Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Harris and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg. At the moment, it is Warren and Harris who appear on an upward trajectory, while the three male candidates trend downward.
Biden’s pitch to voters is moderation, electability and a callback to the halcyon days of the Obama Administration. Sanders seeks to expand the fiery leftist movement he built in 2016. Warren has staked her campaign on wonkishness and economic populism, while Harris paints herself as a crusader for justice. Buttigieg offers a combination of generational change and executive experience. To imagine each of them in the White House is to conjure five very different hypothetical presidencies come January 2021.
On Capitol Hill, the party has been spread along a similar axis of race, power, perspective and privilege. To address the humanitarian crisis on the southern border, Pelosi pushed a compromise bill this summer that sought to fund migrant detention while protecting the rights of asylum seekers. She was opposed by members of the so-called Squad–a quartet of outspoken freshman Representatives who have become champions of the party’s rising left wing: Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. All women of color, all 45 or under, all adept with a Twitter zinger and prone to inflammatory statements, they seek to build a movement and shake up the party–a markedly different theory of change from Pelosi’s dogged insistence on vote counting and the art of the possible.
The ugly sight of a President luxuriating in “send her back” chants laid down a marker for 2020. As much as traditional Republicans might like the President to campaign on a healthy economy, a tax cut that put more money in the pocket of two-thirds of Americans and a slate of new conservative federal judges, Trump plans instead to plunge even further into fear and division. And as much as Democrats might like to talk about health care, climate change and the minimum wage, their candidate will inevitably be dragged into his sucking morass of conspiracy mongering and tribalism.
For a moment, the controversy unified the bickering House Democrats, who passed a resolution condemning Trump’s comments. But behind the scenes, Democrats’ reactions to the spectacle were a test for the electoral theories of their feuding factions. Progressives (and many Republicans) argued that Trump was only making himself more toxic to swing voters. But some in the Democratic establishment fretted that Trump’s repellent statements were a political masterstroke, elevating four fringe figures as the face of the party...
Here's Sarah Kendzior, who's been a regular on MSNBC spreading the hate against this administration, routinely smearing the president as an "autocrat" dictator.
And at the video, Rachel Maddow calls for the entire Mueller team to testify before Congress. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had something to say about the stages of grief, man.
"The public has a right to know whether its own government constitutes a threat to national security and if the president is complicit in a crime." https://t.co/lPkanzgOK7pic.twitter.com/YIMptkV88r
From @danbalz: “Many Democrats long have considered Robert S. Mueller III a potential savior, as the agent of President Trump’s eventual undoing. Wednesday’s hearings on Capitol Hill probably shattered those illusions once and for all.” https://t.co/gjfPgTt52C#TheLedeOfLedes
Many Democrats long have considered Robert S. Mueller III a potential savior, as the agent of President Trump’s eventual undoing. Wednesday’s hearings on Capitol Hill probably shattered those illusions once and for all. If Democrats hope to end the Trump presidency, they will have to do so by defeating him at the ballot box in November 2020.
In reality, that has been the case for months. Still, scheduled testimony by the former special counsel before two House committees offered the possibility that he would say something that would suddenly change public perceptions and dramatically jump-start long-stalled prospects for an impeachment inquiry. That was certainly the Democrats’ goal. If anything, things could move in the opposite direction.
Regardless of the evidence of obstruction contained in Mueller’s report, impeachment is a fraught strategy for the Democrats, given public opinion and the dynamics in the Senate. After Wednesday, the prospects for impeachment appear more remote, which means it will be left to the eventual Democratic presidential nominee, with the help of the party, to develop a comprehensive case against the president, one that can win 270 electoral votes. To date, that hasn’t happened.
House Democrats have fumbled in their efforts to hold Trump and his administration accountable, despite promises to do so. Presidential candidates are more focused on one another and playing to their internal constituencies than on organizing the brief against the president to take into the general-election campaign. That remains a major challenge as the contest moves forward.
Next week’s Democratic debate in Detroit will offer the candidates a fresh opportunity to begin to frame the election — the case for their party and the case against Trump — as well as to state or restate their views about impeaching the president. With Mueller’s testimony over, the onus will be on them to show the leadership what rank-and-file Democrats are looking for.
Mueller gave the Democrats some things they wanted. In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, he rebutted Trump’s claim that he was totally exonerated by the report. Not true, Mueller said. Nor, he told the House Intelligence Committee, was his investigation a hoax or a witch hunt, as the president has claimed. And he seemed to suggest that Trump was not charged with obstruction because Justice Department regulations say that a sitting president cannot be indicted and that a president can be charged after leaving office.
But there was some ambiguity surrounding statements about whether Trump would have been indicted absent those regulations. Before the intelligence committee, Mueller corrected his previous comment, noting that the report did not definitively answer the question of whether Trump had committed a crime.
Meanwhile, the rest of Mueller’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee proved a disappointment to any Democrat who thought that he would take up the role of witness for the prosecution. Laurence H. Tribe, a Harvard law professor and impeachment advocate, tweeted Wednesday afternoon: “Much as I hate to say it, this morning’s hearing was a disaster. Far from breathing life into his damning report, the tired Robert Mueller sucked the life out of it.”
Mueller proved to be a reluctant — and at times shaky — witness. He had warned the Democrats in a brief public statement when he exited the Justice Department in May that he would not go beyond the written report if called to testify...
WASHINGTON — Robert S. Mueller III did little on Wednesday to boost the prospects of impeaching President Trump.
The former special counsel’s highly anticipated testimony before Congress did not deliver the sort of splashy moment that circulates on cable TV. Instead, as he promised, Mueller stuck carefully to the text of his investigative report, occasionally — at times haltingly — offering a nuance, but often providing one-word answers to questions.
The result seemed likely to do little more than harden the opinions held by the public — and lawmakers — on President Trump and whether he should be removed from office.
Even Democratic supporters of impeachment were openly disappointed that the hearing did not deliver fireworks...
MORE ANTI-NYPD HARASSMENT: The @NYCPBA just tweeted a video of another street thug verbally harassing two @NYPDTransit officers on a subway. While saying "freedom of speech" the man verbally harasses the professional officers as they keep their cool. #BlueLivesMatterpic.twitter.com/p3vm9X5xJJ
Dante de Blasio is the son of Democratic New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has abandoned his crime-wracked city (but not his public office, tax-subsidized salary or perks) for a quixotic presidential bid to become America’s social justice warrior-in-chief. Calculated to promote his race card-playing dad’s campaign, Dante stoked anti-cop hysteria a few weeks ago with a widely disseminated USA Today op-ed. Dante’s screed came just days after de Blasio declared at the first Democratic debate:
“I’m different from all of the other candidates in this race in that I’m raising a black son in America.”
De Blasio reminds audiences that Dante is black as often as former GOP presidential candidate John Kasich reminded every unfortunate person within earshot that his dad was a mailman. A Google news search for “De Blasio black son” yields nearly 85,000 hits. We get it. We get it. We get it.
Because his pigment and political bloodline give him the special privilege of making blanket assertions about, well, anything, Dante was rewarded with a major media platform to ply a kinder, gentler version of the vile “Cops=pigs” narrative to an audience of millions. Police officers are menaces on the streets who pose a greater threat to “people of color” than unknown strangers, homeless people and drug addicts, Dante de Blasio argued. He had “no fear on a night walk until the police came,” the op-ed declared darkly.
“We’re taught to fear the people meant to protect us, because the absolute worst-case scenario has happened too many times. This reality cannot continue.”
But actual reality smacked NYPD officers in their heads in two viral videos this week that had non-white witnesses in the ‘hood laughing and jeering hysterically. In Harlem and Brooklyn, cops were attacked with buckets of water while onlookers hooted, hollered and incited chaos. A brazen young thug, not paralyzed in the least by the anxiety that de Blasio conjured up for his column, hurled a bucket that hit one of the LEOs in the back of the head. Members of the neighborhood mobs where the attacks occurred — similarly unaffected by Dante’s manufactured disquietude — whipped out their phones to share their glee and cheered like they were watching an episode of “WWE RAW.”
“Who does that in their right frame of mind? People who believe there’s no consequences,” a law enforcement source fumed to the New York Post. “There’s total anarchy out here.” Another NYPD supervisor warned: “Today it’s a bucket of water. Tomorrow it could be a bucket of cement.” In 1993, a Housing Authority cop John Williamson was murdered after a Washington Heights mob went wild because NYPD officers were towing illegally parked cars. Someone hurled a 30-pound bucket of spackling compound from a building rooftop that struck and killed Williamson.
Here’s more of the reality Dante de Blasio and his cop-hating daddy won’t acknowledge: The Big Apple’s police force has long been the target of racially driven vigilantes who are frightened of nothing and nobody.
Dadashev (13-1, 11 KOs), from Saint Petersburg, Russia, and based in Oxnard, California, needed help leaving the ring. He collapsed before making it to the dressing room and began vomiting. He was taken from the arena on a stretcher and was transported by ambulance to the hospital, where he underwent emergency brain surgery for two hours for a subdural hematoma (bleeding on the brain). Doctors hoped to relieve pressure on the right side of his brain, where most of the damage was, with the surgery and placed him in a medically induced coma to allow time for brain swelling to subside.
WASHINGTON — As a senior Justice Department official and then FBI director for 12 years, Robert S. Mueller III carefully guarded his reputation as a straight shooter in the midst of political upheaval and partisan warfare.
His square-jawed, just-the-facts approach will be put to the ultimate test Wednesday when the former special counsel testifies for five hours in nationally televised House hearings about the Russia investigation, which examined Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election and President Trump’s attempts to shield himself from the probe.
Democrats and Republicans are plotting ways to transform his testimony — first to the House Judiciary Committee and then to the House Intelligence committee — into a series of politically charged sound bites they can use to attack or defend the president.
Democrats plan to steer Mueller toward the most damning parts of his final report, particularly incidents where Trump directed underlings to fire Mueller — none did so — or discourage witnesses from cooperating with the special counsel’s office.
The key question is whether Democrats can get Mueller to say point blank that Trump would have faced criminal charges if he weren’t the president, a declaration that would further blunt Trump’s false claims of full exoneration.
Republicans are expected to pursue a two-pronged approach. They’ll try to undermine Mueller’s credibility by suggesting his team was politically biased against Trump. They also want to highlight conclusions in the report that benefit the president, such as Mueller’s determination that he could not establish a criminal conspiracy between his campaign and Moscow.
Both Democrats and Republicans have at least one thing in common: They expect to face a reluctant witness with a history of terse, dry answers to overheated congressional questioning.
“I think he will be equally parsimonious with both sides,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), chair of the House Intelligence Committee.
Mueller did not want to testify, telling reporters on May 29 that he would not go beyond the details contained in the 448-page report released six weeks earlier. But he agreed to appear on Capitol Hill after Democrats issued him a subpoena.
Jim Popkin, a spokesman for Mueller, said he’s preparing for the hearing with a small group of former officials from the special counsel’s office.
“This is someone who has prided himself over the years for very careful preparation. He will be extremely well prepared come Wednesday,” Popkin said Monday.
Mueller will make an opening statement and submit a redacted copy of his report for the record.
“I think it’s safe to say that on Wednesday he will stick to the four walls of the Mueller report as much as he can,” Popkin said.
In a Monday letter, the Justice Department told Mueller that his testimony “must remain within the boundaries of your public report” to avoid infringing upon executive privilege and other confidentiality requirements. The letter said Mueller had requested guidance from the department earlier this month, a suggestion that he may rely on it to avoid answering questions he wants to avoid.
Democrats have made no secret of their goals — they worry that Trump paid little price for pushing legal and political boundaries, and they’re concerned that voters struggled to digest the lengthy report.
“Not everybody will read the book, but people will watch the movie,” said a Democratic staff member on the Judiciary Committee, who requested anonymity to discuss preparations for the hearing...
OH NO! A 9-year-old girl was thrown in the air by a bison when the animal charged a group of about 50 tourists at Yellowstone National Park. STORY: https://t.co/Do3487Dn8Opic.twitter.com/bke0xt3FDV
Dems condemn Trump's actions as racist and refocus debate on "kitchen table" issues. But more voices now tell 2020ers that's not enough - they need to speak directly to their racial vision to combat Trump's white ID ptx. This is the kitchen table, they sayhttps://t.co/aLpfjIGuAd
GREENVILLE, N.C. — President Trump waited for 13 seconds, as the chants from the crowd of thousands grew louder.
“Send her home!” the North Carolina audience yelled, mimicking Mr. Trump’s recent tweet attacking a Somali-born Democratic congresswoman.
“Treason!” one man screamed.
“Traitor!” shouted another.
The moment Wednesday night, a microcosm of the angry tribalism that often emanates from Mr. Trump’s campaign rallies, immediately caused ripple effects for the president and his party. Some Republican members of Congress denounced the chant as racist and xenophobic. Mr. Trump tepidly disavowed his supporters’ words, only to praise them the following day. For Democrats, especially the candidates seeking to defeat Mr. Trump, the impact of the rally was clear: This will be a general election focused on race, identity and Mr. Trump’s brand of white grievance politics.
Until this past week, the 2020 field has generally tried to ignore the president’s incendiary language — talking about it, the thinking goes, only gives him more power. Instead, candidates have preferred to discuss policies, making the case for themselves by advocating changes in the criminal justice system or maternal health, or ways to eliminate the racial wealth gap.
Now some feel an urgency to take a different approach.
“This election will be a referendum, not on Donald Trump, but a referendum on who we are and who we must be to each other,” Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey said. “But this is going to get worse before it gets better.”
Senator Kamala Harris of California, the most viable woman of color to run for president, said that the scenes from Mr. Trump’s rally, while personally upsetting, were not surprising.
“When we’re on that stage together in the general, I know he’ll try to pull the same thing with me,” Ms. Harris said. “But I’m fully prepared for that. I’m up for it. Because he is small. He is wrong. He is a bully.”
And at a fund-raiser in Los Angeles on Friday, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. told supporters that Mr. Trump is “tearing at the social fabric of this country.”
“This is not hyperbole,” Mr. Biden said. “The fact of the matter is this president is more George Wallace than George Washington.”
But even as Democratic candidates universally denounced Mr. Trump’s comments, they did not agree on how the eventual presidential nominee should combat the racial division embedded in those words. Do you, on the campaign trail, talk directly about the president’s inflammatory language, racism and discrimination in this country? Or do you talk about jobs and the economy?
Democratic Party leaders, particularly establishment figures with ties to Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns, have largely followed a strategy of careful avoidance: responding to the president’s most inflammatory moments, while attempting to redirect the political debate to what is often described as “kitchen table” issues, such as health care and wages.
However, an increasingly vocal group of Democratic grass-roots organizers and pollsters believe that Mr. Trump’s words and legislative actions amount to a cohesive playbook of white identity politics, meant to court white voters of all economic tiers around the idea that their fates are linked, and are under threat by an increasingly diversifying America. They argue that racism and the public performance of it is a “kitchen table” issue for many voters — black and white — that must be dealt with head-on.
“Just as much time and resources as the nominee spends on targeting and messaging around health care and wages and climate change, they should spend an equal amount of resources around an alternative racial vision for the country,” said Cornell Belcher, a prominent pollster who worked with Mr. Obama. “This isn’t a goddamn distraction.”
Ana Maria Archila, the co-executive director of the progressive group Center for Popular Democracy, said Democrats must embrace this moment as an opportunity.
“You have to be able to speak powerfully about our willingness to belong together,” Ms. Archila said. “Don’t just condemn the racism and the language but use it as an opportunity to argue for a vision of the country in which we can all be included.”
To some progressives, the stakes are not just winning in 2020...
Jonathan Yaniv is the tranny "Jessica" Yaniv, and he's the one who's been able to get feminists kicked off Twitter, Lindsey Shepherd most recently. Also Meghan Murphy, who covers the latest in the scandal at Feminist Current.
The brilliant & brave Meghan Murphy on the JY case - and the publication ban has been lifted! It's Jessica Yaniv, @trustednerd, who wants Canadian human-rights law to be used to force unwilling women to wax her testicles, on pain of fines & public shaming https://t.co/5m8Z1G3bf3
.@politico included THE GREAT BELIEVERS by @rebeccamakkai and THE FEATHER THIEF in their roundup of books titled "What the 2020 Candidates, James Comey and Other Politicos Are Reading This Summer." https://t.co/catcJWkRYb
I haven't read his book so I don't know if he's any good or not, but I've read Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism, and yes, that was a fascist chant at the Trump rally.
The thing is, though, leftists want you to think we're back in the 1930s and the Nazi threat today is real. The only problem is it's not. Hitler dismantled the German democracy in 1933. Trump might lose reelection in 2020. All the leftist outrage is theater. The fact is we're in a populist nationalist moment. Sometimes the rhetoric sounds fascist. But leftists never look at their own side, with their own fascists and communists, who're doing by far the most damage, and are in fact responsible for the rise of the new politics of the age
Once people figure that out it's all a lot easier to digest.
ICYMI ==> ‘Shocking’! Georgia State Rep accelerates walk-back of story about ‘white man’ that ‘verbally assaulted’ her at grocery store https://t.co/QD4L4w2y0g
"In feudal times, classical heritage was replaced by rigid religious dogma. Today’s clerisy uses the education system, media, & the means of cultural production to impose its standards of “privilege” & value, & to decide who deserves special dispensations" https://t.co/0tvtMZDn6E
This is just one of those things that society will happily ignore until every women's sport is swelled to the ranks with transgender athletes whose records are identical to that of men's sports.
PC is like Jonestown on a civilizational scale. There's enormous social pressure to drink tne Kool Aid. Future archaeologists will be unable to explain what they find.
You did not contact me before printing defamatory statements about my work. I have filed a formal request with the @AP for an immediate correction of your harmful, malicious characterizations. https://t.co/BkM5lbyslA
From the @ap rule guide - YOUR rules: "Whenever we portray someone in a negative light, we must make a real effort to obtain a response from that person. When mistakes are made, they must be corrected – fully, quickly and ungrudgingly." https://t.co/KSHAfH5uiKpic.twitter.com/VL70m2hv1P
.@IlhanOmar claims she isn't #antisemitic but her statements and actions speak louder. In her short tenure as Congresswoman, she's alienated many of her Somali voters, her Democratic colleagues, and introduced a pro-BDS bill - a movement established and infiltrated by terrorists pic.twitter.com/zKIV2AR8eI
It's really not just a "socialist revolution" transforming our country. It's a postmodern revolution, which includes doctrinaire socialist (Marxist) ideologies, but is really the whole pantheon of "critical theorists" dating back to at least Nietzsche.
A good piece, whatever the case.
At the Epoch Times:
The likes of Fredrick Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Fredrick Engels, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Michael Foucault began a #Socialist revolution that is transforming out society’s cultural foundations. #Socialism
I'm tired of hearing conservative friends apologize for President Trump's "go back to where you came from" tweets about the likes of Ilhan Omar. The president has the moral high ground, and the weasel war dance of the mainstream media shouldn't distract us from this fact.
Even his worst enemies (e.g. ex-conservative David Frum) concede that Trump's attacks on the anti-American extremists in the Democratic Party are smart politics. As Tucker Carlson observed in his June 16 keynote at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, a new Axios poll gives the Jew-baiting Somali an approval rating of 9%: "Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota — another member of The Squad — was recognized by 53% of the voters; 9% (not a typo) had a favorable view." Not a typo, indeed. When is the last time any American politican had a 9% approval rating? Americans really detest this wretched character, and with good reason. It has nothing to do with race, but with rhetoric that breaks the boundaries of acceptable political discourse, America-hating and Jew-baiting.
But this isn't about trolling the Democrats. It's about principle. President Trump has a gift for asking the obvious questions that the elites avoid, for example: What idiot let Omar into the United States in the first place? Come to think of it, why should we admit immigrants who hate us and hate everything we stand for? I believe that new Americans are as good as old Americans, and sometimes better, if they become Americans with a passion for our principles and love for what we represent. But we are under no obligation to open our national home to our enemies. The liberal globalist idea that we need to bow, scrape and apologize to every foreigner with a grudge against us rankles the American people. That inanity appeals to a few Americans--maybe about 9%, judging from the Axios poll. The rest of us have had it up to here.
Where were our holier-than-thou Democrats when the detestable Ilhan Omar dismissed the murder of thousands of Americans on 9/11 with a wink and a nod and the words, "Some people did something"? We know where they were then Omar claimed that Jews buy the votes of congressmen with cash ("It's the Benjamins, baby"). The Democratic-controlled House passed a limp-noodle resolution deploring anti-Semitism along with hostility to Muslims after 9-11 -- in response to overtly racist statements by Omar. That's right -- racist. Mind if I say it again? Rep. Ilhan Omar is a racist, because anti-Semitism is a species of racism. The false allegation that Jews buy pro-Israel votes with money is an old racist caricature. No-one in the Democratic leadership has the honesty to denounce Omar as a racist.
President Trump's remarks had NOTHING whatever to do about race. He attacked America haters. The color of their skin is irrelevant. By attacking him as a racist, the Democratic leadership has debased the concept of racism. Racism is a wicked and terrible thing. People should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Race hatred and race prejudice are detestable. But the racist here is NOT the president of the United States, but rather Rep. Ilhan Omar.
Omar's racism has consequences. Synagogues in Pittsburgh and San Diego were the victims of recent mass shootings. Physical assaults against Jews are routine in parts of New York City. Omar's racist rabble-rousing puts lives in danger. According to the FBI, hate crimes against Jews comprised 58% of all hate crimes in the United States during 2018, although Jews are about 1% of the U.S. population. Anti-Semitic lies of the sort that Omar propounds are an incitement to murder and mayhem. The Democrats refuse to discipline their own rogue elements. Someone had to call them out, and President Trump did...
It’s hard to take braying morons like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Terrorist Cheerleader Twins seriously, but maybe we should. After all, these aspiring dictatorettes are the heart, soul, and perpetually open mouth of today’s Democrat Party. We kind of assume they are jokes because, well, they are jokes, but history teaches that the socialist future they advocate is no laughing matter. They are now setting the agenda for one of America’s two great political parties. What would happen if they somehow took power?
WASHINGTON — The morning after chants of “Send her back” rang across one of his campaign rallies, President Trump sought to disavow it, insisting that he “was not happy with it.”
Trump made no effort to stop the chants during his rally in North Carolina on Wednesday night. Instead, he paused during the shouting and looked on for several seconds, appearing to show approval. The crowd broke into the chants of “Send her back” as Trump began cataloging grievances against Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
“I was not happy with it — I disagree with it,” Trump told reporters during a photo session in the Oval Office on Thursday morning.
His disavowal of the chants came after a growing number of Republican congressional leaders criticized it but sought to put distance between the president and the racist chants.
“Those chants have no place in our party or our country,”House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield told reporters.
Later, at a news conference, McCarthy avoided repeating his criticism and defended Trump, saying that “the president did not join in” the chanting. “The president moved on.”
Pressed on whether Trump should have admonished the crowd to stop, McCarthy said the question was unfair.
“You want to dislike the president so much, you want to try to hold him accountable for something in a big audience,” he said. “I think that’s an unfair position.”
The head of the Republican congressional campaign committee, Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, was among Republican congressional leaders who criticized the chant.
“There’s no place for that kind of talk,” he said at a breakfast for reporters sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.
The shouts at the rally carried obvious echoes of Trump’s favorite 2016 chant, “Lock her up,” which broke its own norms by calling for the incarceration of his political opponent, Hillary Clinton. That chant became a hallmark of Trump rallies even long after he had defeated Clinton.
Omar is one of four women of color in the so-called “squad” of progressive members of Congress whom Trump attacked earlier this week, suggesting that they should “go back” to “the crime infested places from which they came.” The others are Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.).
All four are American. Three were born in the United States; Omar was born in Somalia.
The racist tweet prompted the House to pass a resolution of condemnation on Tuesday, mostly along party lines. Four Republicans and an independent joined the chamber’s Democrats in condemning Trump’s words. The president has only reiterated his attacks, and his comments at Wednesday’s rally confirmed expectations that he plans to use the clash with the women to drive a hard racial wedge as he campaigns for reelection in 2020...
There's gotta be thousands and thousands of these stories out there these days. Don't back down to the mob. They're never satisfied until your blood soaks the streets.
Beto O’Rourke — the losing Texas candidate for the US Senate who bootstrapped his way into becoming a losing presidential candidate — had a message for refugees who had come to America: Your new country is a hellhole.
The former congressman told a roundtable of refugees and immigrants in Nashville last week: “This country was founded on white supremacy. And every single structure that we have in this country still reflects the legacy of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and suppression.”
Just in case the newcomers were inclined to believe that they had escaped to the greatest country on Earth — an open, dynamic, generous society that, whatever their struggles now, will afford them opportunities unimaginable back home — Beto was there to tell them of all its sins.
He had made himself into an instrument of woke assimilation.
This is the backdrop of the controversy over Ilhan Omar, the Somali-born left-wing member of Congress whom President Trump urged, in particularly noxious tweets, to return to her native country and fix it before presuming to tell us what to do.
It’s a mistake, though, to think that Omar is anything other than on her way to total assimilation, only on the terms set out by Beto O’Rourke...
The nice thing about Demi Rose, or really any whore on the internet, is that they are all so photoshopped, sexualizing them, like they sexualize themselves is less offensive than it would be if they were a girl half naked on the street….
You see, when you created an Artificial version of someone, they sort of become a cartoon character, so you should be allowed to write all the “Rape” comments you want on her instagram without people getting mad, without the girl feeling creeped on or creeped out….because it’s fiction. A fantasy. Anime. Whatever...
You’re right, Mr. President - you don’t have a racist bone in your body.
You have a racist mind in your head, and a racist heart in your chest.
That’s why you violate the rights of children and tell the Congresswoman who represents your home borough, to “go back to my country.” https://t.co/adlCUO7r0v
Donald Trump is lashing out at me, @AOC, @RashidaTlaib, & @AyannaPressley because he wants to divide our country. We will not allow his latest attacks distract us from working to ensure a brighter future for all. https://t.co/wQhSPwgipk
Reporting from Washington — President Trump delivered some of the most incendiary comments of his presidency on Monday, signaling that he intends to build his reelection bid as much around divisive racial and cultural issues as on low unemployment and economic growth.
The rhetoric sparked unusual pushback from several Republicans, and led to a dramatic clash in which four first-year House Democrats — all women of color — denounced Trump’s language as “xenophobic,” “bigoted” and unworthy of a sitting president.
Earlier, Trump had vilified the four elected members of Congress as “people who hate our country.”
“They hate it, I think, with a passion,” he told reporters.
The House is planning to condemn Trump’s comments as “racist” in a resolution to be voted upon as soon as Tuesday. The four-page resolution praises immigrants and condemns Trump’s comments, which have “legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.”
Trump was asked Monday if he was concerned that white nationalists had found common cause with him after he had urged progressive Democrats to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
“It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me,” Trump said. “And all I’m saying is if they want to leave, they can leave.”
Trump questioned the patriotism of the four lawmakers — all U.S. citizens and three born in the United States — at an event intended to highlight American-made products.
His rhetoric trampled over the economic populism his aides had sought to convey with the visual display of motorcycles and military equipment, providing new evidence that Trump’s “America First” agenda is as much about identity politics as it is about trade.
Trump views his efforts to fan racial and ethnic tensions as a political positive for his reelection campaign, even as others worry about the long-term damage to a country that has long struggled to reconcile its commitment to pluralism with its historical racism.
Overall, Trump’s taunts to the four — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — served to unify Democrats just as they were facing one of their most serious fractures since taking control of the House in the 2018 election.
Pressley was born in Cincinnati, Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Tlaib in Detroit. Omar was born in Somalia and came to the United States in 1997 as a refugee, later becoming a U.S. citizen.
But it also elevated the four progressives in the public eye, potentially causing more problems for Democratic leadership.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) has been at odds with the four over the direction of the House majority, including a recent border spending bill. For weeks, progressives viewed Pelosi as pandering to more politically vulnerable moderates in the caucus.
But the four focused only on Trump Monday in a 20-minute news conference at the Capitol.
“This is the agenda of white nationalists,” said Omar, who accused Trump of tweeting to distract Americans from his policies. “We can continue to enable this president and report on the bile of garbage that comes out of his mouth or hold him accountable for his crimes.”
The president can’t defend his policies, “so what he does is attack us personally and that is what this is all about,” Ocasio-Cortez agreed. “He can’t look a child in the face and look all Americans in the face to justify why this country is throwing [them] in cages,” referring to migrant detention camps on the Southwest border.
“Despite the occupant of the White House’s attempt to marginalize us and silence us, please know we are more than four people,” Pressley said. “We ran on a mandate to represent those … left behind.”
Elected Republican officials were largely silent on Sunday, but several condemned Trump’s language on Monday, collectively forming some of the most significant pushback the president has seen from fellow Republicans.
“I am confident that every Member of Congress is a committed American,” tweeted Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio). Trump’s tweets “were racist and he should apologize. We must work as a country to rise above hate, not enable it.”
Some of the president’s sometime-critics — including Republicans Rep. Will Hurd of Texas and Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine — spoke out.
So did Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, who called Trump’s comments “destructive, demeaning, and disunifying” in a tweet. He added, “People can disagree over politics and policy, but telling American citizens to go back to where they came from is over the line.”
But unexpected critics arose, too.
Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) said Trump “was wrong to suggest that four left-wing congresswomen should go back to where they came from. Three of the four were born in America and the citizenship of all four is as valid as mine.”
Some Republicans supported Trump, however, suggesting that his mark on GOP politics would probably continue even after he leaves office.
“There’s no question that the members of Congress that @realDonaldTrump called out have absolutely said anti-American and anti-Semitic things. I’ll pay for their tickets out of this country if they just tell me where they’d rather be,” tweeted Rep. Ralph Abraham (R-La.)...
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