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!
Other than the fact that Lena Dunham is the daughter of rich parents who leveraged her connections to land a contract for a low-rated feminist “comedy” on HBO, why would anyone care about her opinions? What has Lena Dunham ever done that would make anyone think that American women are in need of her “enlightening” through feminism? Does her “rhetoric of self-empowerment” include fingering her baby sister and lying about being raped by a Republican?
If you are a Christian, Lena Dunham hates you. If you are a Republican voter, Lena Dunham hates you. Lena Dunham hates babies. Lena Dunham wants the government to use your tax money to kill babies. Lena Dunham says she is “interested in engaging in a conversation,” but what she really wants is to silence anyone who tells the truth in America...
I don't care much about Lena Dunham. Seriously, I watched "Girls" exactly one time, and my main impression was that she's a slut who liberally fucks people on cable TV. That's it. She took her clothes off and got fucked. That was her "talent."
“Conservatives were justifiably worried that America’s decline was reaching a point of no return,” writes David Horowitz. After the recent election, many breathed a sign of relief, but as the author of Big Agenda sees it, “one battle is over, but there are many more to come.” To prevail, the combatants must want to win, but as the author notes that has not always been the case with Republicans.
In 2012, for example, Mitt Romney possessed strategic intelligence on his opponent yet failed to deploy it and duly lost the election. In 2016, Romney blasted fellow Republican Donald Trump as “a phony, a fraud,” a charge the openly fraudulent Clinton gleefully used in her attack ads. Veterans of the Bush White House announced that they would vote for Clinton, and somebody named Evan McMullin launched a presidential run in Utah, as Big Agenda notes, “in the hopes of blocking a Trump majority in the Electoral College.”
In the six years they controlled both houses of Congress, the Republicans failed to conduct an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. They threatened to defund the Obama agenda then wound up funding it. Likewise, they failed to investigate Huma Abedin, a Muslim Brotherhood acolyte joined at the hip to Hillary Clinton.
These and other examples of the Republicans’ ineptitude, “failure of nerve” and “cowardice” prompt Horowitz to wonder what they failed to understand about the perils of the nation, and “the destructive agendas of the left that threaten its future.” Here the author draws on his vast experience.
The progressive movement operates on “almost religious convictions,” which is why members move in lockstep, and demonize anyone outside their ranks. The movement divides society into “oppressor” groups such as whites, males, Christians and heterosexuals and victim or “oppressed” groups such as “people of color” and the LGBT squads. For Horowitz this is “the old Marxist wine in new bottles,” with similar results of division and dissention.
“Progressives dream of a world of political correctness and politically enforced equality, where everybody is taken care of by taxing the rich until there are no more rich,
universities and schools admit no ideas that are hurtful or offending, environments have no pollution, countries have no borders, and nations have no armies. Progressives are so enthralled by their dreams of a heaven on earth that they see those who oppose their dreams as evil, which is why they hate them.” But as the author shows, progressives amount to more than utopianism and demonology.
With Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals as their bible, they have built a vast power base in government bureaucracies, government employee unions, and educational institutions in particular. Horowitz cites Janet Napolitano, the former Arizona governor and Department of Homeland Security boss under Obama. As president of the University of California Napolitano deems unacceptable “microagressions” statements such as “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” At the same time, as the author observes, UC Berkeley hosts a Center for Race and Gender that includes “Islamophobia Studies,” all funded by California taxpayers.
This movement commands almost total control over the Democratic Party and is too powerful for leaders to deviate from the path. For their part, Republicans are afraid of being called “obstructionists” and stigmatized as heartless, racist, or xenophobic. That fear leaves them ill-equipped for conflict with the interlocking directorate of progressive power. But as the author shows, it is possible to take it on and win.
Horowitz charts government union threats and thuggery against Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Yet Walker “demonstrated the will to stand up to them” and prevailed.
In similar style, Hillary Clinton charged that supporters of Donald Trump were “irredeemable,” a veritable “basket of deplorables.” Trump supporters were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic— you name it.”
Trump fired back that “Hillary has tremendous hatred in her heart,” and as Horowitz notes, “never had any Republican dared to characterize a Democratic opponent in such damning moral terms to a national audience.” Trump continued to defy political correctness in brawling style, and he won. It will take that kind of defiance to “save America,” as the Big Agenda subtitle says.
“The strategy is to expose their hypocrisy and turn their firepower against them,” Horowitz explains, “to focus on the races, genders, ethnicities, and classes who suffer because of their policies and under their rule. The strategy is to go for the jugular.”
To turn around the battles conservatives have been losing for so long, “they must begin every confrontation by punching progressives in the mouth.” The attack must take away progressives’ “moral superiority and smugness.” Let this reviewer volunteer an example of how that could be done.
In the Sessions hearings, Senator Richard Blumenthal, (D-CT) charged that David Horowitz, who wasn’t there, made “apparently racist” statements, which he did not. When dealing with Blumenthal, conservatives should always point out that he is a liar who said he served in Vietnam but did not. But it’s not just about rhetoric...
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals violated both judicial precedent and the Constitution’s separation of powers in its ruling against President Trump’s executive order on immigration. If the ruling stands, it will pose a danger to national security.
Under normal rules of standing, the states of Washington and Minnesota should never have been allowed to bring this suit. All litigants, including states, must meet fundamental standing requirements: an injury to a legally protected interest, caused by the challenged action, that can be remedied by a federal court acting within its constitutional power. This suit fails on every count.
The plaintiff states assert that their public universities are injured because the order affects travel by certain foreign students and faculty. But that claim involved no legally protected interest. The granting of visas and the decision to admit aliens into the country are discretionary powers of the federal government. Unadmitted aliens have no constitutional right to enter the U.S. In hiring or admitting foreigners, universities were essentially gambling that these noncitizens could make it to America and be admitted. Under the theory of standing applied in this case, universities would be able to sponsor any alien, anywhere in the world, then go to court to challenge a decision to exclude him.
It is also settled law that a state can seek to vindicate only its own rights, not those of third parties, against the national government. The U.S. Supreme Court held in Massachusetts v. Mellon (1923) that it is not within a state’s duty or power to protect its citizens’ “rights in respect of their relations with the Federal Government.” Thus the plaintiffs’ claims that the executive order violates various constitutional rights, such as equal protection, due process and religious freedom, are insufficient because these are individual and not states’ rights.
Even if states could articulate a concrete injury, this is not a case in which the courts ultimately can offer redress. The Constitution grants Congress plenary power over immigration, and Congress has vested the president by statute with broad, nonreviewable discretionary authority to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens . . . he may deem to be appropriate” to protect “the interest of the United States.” Numerous presidents have used this authority to suspend entry of aliens from specific countries.
Further, as the Supreme Court explained in Knauff v. Shaughnessy (1950), the authority to exclude aliens “stems not alone from the legislative power but is inherent in the executive power to control the foreign affairs of the nation.” In issuing the order, the president was acting at the apex of his authority. As Justice Robert Jackson noted in Youngstown v. Sawyer (1952): “When the President acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress, his authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate.” That point the Ninth Circuit ignored entirely.
The order, frequently mischaracterized as a “Muslim ban,” is actually directed at seven countries that the president believes present a particular threat to U.S. security—a view with which Congress agreed in 2015. All are beset by terrorists and so uncertain and chaotic that proper vetting of potential refugees and immigrants is virtually impossible.
President Obama chose to toughen vetting standards for these countries’ nationals rather than bar their entry completely. But if Mr. Trump has a different view of the threat, it is not up to the courts to decide who is right. This is a classic example of a nonjusticiable “political question,” involving matters constitutionally vested in the president and Congress.
Judges—were they adjudicating a suit brought by a party with standing—could overturn the president’s order if it entailed clear violations of due process or equal protection. But attempting to discern Mr. Trump’s motivation in selecting these countries exceeds the judiciary’s proper constitutional role. Judges scrutinize government motives in the domestic context, if presented with allegations that facially neutral governmental action is motivated by invidious discrimination. That inquiry is inappropriate in the foreign-policy sphere...
She committed identity theft, stealing someone's Social Security number. Has lived illegally in the U.S. for over two decades. She should've been deported years ago.
A Phoenix woman in the country illegally who was considered a low priority for deportation by the Obama administration has been taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Immigrant advocates say her detention reflects the severity of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, 36, had lived in the country since she was 14. She was arrested in 2008 during a workplace raid ordered by then-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio at Golfland Sunsplash amusement park in Mesa, Ariz., and convicted of felony identity theft for possessing false papers.
A mother of two, she continued to live in Arizona and checked in with ICE every six months. On her scheduled meeting Wednesday morning, she arrived at the ICE field office in Phoenix surrounded by supporters. An immigration attorney later told the crowd outside that Garcia de Rayos had been arrested.
We’re already caught up in how terrible the Trump presidency is, but over the next four years, it will be important to remember just how bad the Obama presidency was. When overcome with frustration at the current administration, I would urge readers to come back to this post and remember that the last president was also quite terrible. In his farewell speech, Obama tried to make the argument for his presidency’s accomplishments, but many of them were simply court cases that were decided while he was president, or decisions that were nice but had little real policy impact.
There have been plenty of reflections on the Obama presidency, but I think a high level overview of everything Obama did would put in perspective just how awful he’s been, especially as we experience the incompetency and horrible policy decisions of the current administration. I’ve done this by letter grades A through F.
Actually, I'm quite enjoying the current administration, thank you.
The extraordinary battle over Betsy DeVos’s nomination to be secretary of education is the defining event of the Trump presidency’s early days.
As presented, the DeVos confirmation appeared to be a standard partisan conflict between Democrats and Republicans, or in the conventional update, all that’s good and all that’s Trump.
But something deeper was at stake here, which is why the Democrats raised the nomination for a second-level cabinet post to a political apocalypse.
The person who introduced Mrs. DeVos at her confirmation hearing was former Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman from Connecticut, arguably the last of the unequivocal Democratic moderates. In the confirmation vote, every Democrat opposed Mrs. DeVos, including Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota.
The issue presumably at the center of this nomination fight is the future of the education of black children who live in urban neighborhoods.
During a strike in the 1930s, a miner’s wife wrote a song that became a Democratic anthem, “Which Side Are You On?” The question remains: Which side are you on?
A standard answer is that the interests of the Democrats and the teachers unions are conjoined. Still, many of us have wondered at the party’s massive resistance to public-school alternatives and most reforms.
Beneath that resistance sits a grim reality: Many urban school systems are slowly dying. As with the decline of the industrial unions, the Democrats’ urban base of teachers is disappearing by attrition. The party is desperate to hold on to what’s left, and increasingly that includes its bedrock —black parents.
Enrollment in many urban schools has been declining for years. It’s down significantly in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City and elsewhere. Falling alongside have been membership rolls in urban teachers unions, notably in Michigan and Wisconsin, two Trump pickups this election.
Families who could afford it have moved away. Many adult blacks stayed behind and, inexorably, the education of their children fell behind, a fact documented annually year after year. By the way, good public teachers got trapped, too. Some of the best lost heart and left, replaced by less able teachers, some grossly so.
For parents of children in the nation’s suburban public schools, none of this mattered much, so sustained political support for reform of city schools was never very deep. But in the cities, dissent rose.
The charter-school movement emerged first in Minnesota in 1991. Wisconsin passed the first school-choice legislation in 1989, authored by a Democratic black activist named Polly Williams. Some of us thought then that Polly Williams was the start of a new, bipartisan civil-rights movement. How naive we were.
The movement persisted. According to a 2016 study by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, using state databases, these are the percentages of students now enrolled in public charters only:
In now-famous Flint, Mich.: 53%. Kansas City: 40%; Philadelphia: 32%; the District of Columbia: 45%; Detroit: 53%.
In Louisiana, which essentially abandoned its failed central-administration model after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans charters are at 92%.
The steady migration of poor families to these alternatives is a historic saga of social transformation. It happened for two reasons: to escape public-school disorder and to give their kids a shot at learning.
This is one of greatest civil-rights stories since the mid-1960s. And the Democratic Party’s role in it? About zero. Other than, as in the past two weeks, resistance...
The big news yesterday was how Yemen was "denying permission" for U.S. ground operations in the country, following the raid in which Chief Special Warfare Operator William "Ryan" Owens was killed.
Well, turns out that was fake news.
See the Washington Post, plus Ralph Peters with the analysis tonight below:
Yemen reviews deadly U.S. raid on al-Qaeda, but stops short of issuing ban https://t.co/WaYK8ExxAC
Hey, we wanted more, but kids aren't cheap, and we have no family nearby to help at home with the children.
But yeah, folks should have more. Environmentalists love abortion because women can murder their unborn children because climate change. (Yeah, leftists are evil like that.)
At Quillette, which is a great magazine (that I don't read enough):
If You’re Reading This Essay, You Should Probably Have (More) Childrenhttps://t.co/tQ1uGRS8D8
Even before its students rioted in the streets, distressed that right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos would dare to open his mouth in their presence, UC Berkeley presented a visual illustration of the academy’s decline from a place of learning to a victimology hothouse. Within walking distance on the Berkeley campus are emblems of both a vanished academic world and the diversity-industrial complex that ousted it.
Emblem 1: In Bauhaus-era typography, a quotation from Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo adorns the law school’s otherwise brutalist facade.
“You will study the wisdom of the past, for in a wilderness of conflicting counsels, a trail has there been blazed. You will study the life of mankind, for this is the life you must order, and, to order with wisdom, must know. You will study the precepts of justice, for these are the truths that through you shall come to their hour of triumph. Here is the high emprise, the fine endeavor, the splendid possibility of achievement, to which I summon you and bid you welcome.”
No law school today, if erecting itself from scratch, would think of parading such sentiments, first uttered in 1925, on its exterior. Cardozo’s invocation of “mankind” is alone cause for removal, but equally transgressive is his belief that there is wisdom in the past and not just discrimination. He presents learning as a heroic enterprise focused not on the self but on the vast world beyond, both past and present. Education is the search for objective knowledge that takes the learner into a grander universe of thought and achievement.
Stylistically, Cardozo’s elevated tone is as old-fashioned as his complicated syntactical cadences; his exhortation to intellectual mastery is too “masculinist” and triumphal for today’s identity-obsessed university.
His celebration of the law overlooks the teachings of critical race theory, which purports to expose the racial subtext of seemingly benign legal concepts. And he fatally omits any mention of “inclusion” and “diversity.”
There’s not a trace of the heroic on the Berkeley law school’s website today; the closest it comes to any ennobling inspiration is the statement: “We believe that a Berkeley Law degree is a tool for change, both locally and globally.”
But this bland expression of progressive ideology is positively Miltonic compared with the bromides on display just meters away from the law school .
Emblem 2: UC Berkeley’s Division of Equity and Inclusion has placed vertical banners across the main campus reminding students of the contemporary university’s paramount mission: assigning guilt and innocence within the ruthlessly competitive hierarchy of victimhood. Each banner shows a photo of a student or a member of the student-services bureaucracy, beside a purported quotation from that student or bureaucrat. No rolling cadences here, no exhortations to intellectual conquest. Instead, just whining or penitential snippets from the academic lexicon of identity politics.
“I will acknowledge how power and privilege intersect in our daily lives,” vows an Asian female member of the class of 2017. Just how crippling is that intersection? The answer comes in a banner showing a black female student in a backward baseball cap and a male Latino student, who together urge the Berkeley community to “create an environment where people other than yourself can exist.”
A naive observer of the Berkeley campus would think that lots of people “other than yourself” exist there, and would even think that Berkeley welcomes those “other” people with overflowing intellectual and material riches. Such a misperception, however, is precisely why Berkeley funds the Division of Equity and Inclusion with a cool $20 million annually and staffs it with 150 full-time functionaries: It takes that much money and personnel to drum into students’ heads how horribly Berkeley treats its “othered” students.
A member of the student-services bureaucracy reinforces the message of continual oppression on her banner. “I will be a brave and sympathetic ally,” announces Bene Gatzert of University Health Services. Cardozo saw grandeur in the mastery of the common law; today’s campus functionary sees herself in a heroic struggle against the ubiquitous forces of white-male heterosexual oppression...
Passionate protests against Donald Trump's presidency have swelled the ranks of Democratic activists, but their new enthusiasm faces a hard reality: Republicans remain well-positioned to retain their grip on power in the 2018 elections.
While Republicans hold only a slim majority in the U.S. Senate, Democrats occupy most of the seats up for election in two years. That means they must play defense against Republicans, especially in 10 states that Trump won.
In the U.S. House, Republicans will be aided by favorable district boundaries that were drawn to maintain GOP political dominance. In some cases, the congressional districts were gerrymandered to pack high numbers of Democratic voters into just a few districts as a way to create a greater number of Republican-leaning seats.
"Democrats are extremely fired up right now," said Sam Wang, a Princeton University neuroscientist and statistician who has developed a statistical model for analyzing partisan gerrymandering.
But for Democrats to win back Congress, Wang said it "would take an extreme event. The question is, are we seeing something that's headed towards that?"
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is targeting 59 Republican-held House seats in 24 states as it builds toward the next election. Those include 23 districts where Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton defeated Trump and various others that Republicans took away from Democrats in recent years...
Perhaps there's an increase in anti-Semitic attacks, but it takes a Republican in office to have leftist outlets take them seriously. When far-left jihadists call for the annihilation of the Jews in Israel --- "From the desert to the sea, Palestine will be free..." --- it's crickets.
Remember to always read widely and know your enemy. (Plus, you know me: I love all the crazy leftist theories these days. There's never a dull moment, lol.)
I seriously didn't know the Super Bowl had become a site of contestation in the polarization wars.
Apparently, as a big Trump supporter, I was supposed to be backing New England. The only problem? I hate the Patriots, and have so consistently for 15 years, after the "Tuck Rule Game" at Foxboro Stadium, January 19, 2002.
The left really has the guns out for Ms. Conway. CNN reportedly rebuked the White House regarding a Sunday Conway appearance on the network, which is weird, since the same folks were moaning two weeks ago that she wouldn't come on. Now they're considering "a permanent ban." What's happened is degenerate leftists have fixed on attacking Ms. Conway's "credibility," obviously because she's so freakin' good at deflecting debased radical left smears.
Democrats don’t know how long they’ll be able to keep up the pace of protests against President Donald Trump — and they’re worried Trump and his team are counting on them to run out of energy before the White House does.
Two weeks into the Trump administration, party leaders have already reached a frantic, fevered pitch, throwing around talk of constitutional crisis and raising the specter of impeachment.
“The thing that we don’t want to do is anesthetize the public with dozens and dozens of press conferences and marquee events,” said Seattle Mayor Ed Murray. “Then it’ll just become background noise. I’m worried that’s exactly what they’re trying to maneuver us into doing.”
Democrats are having as much trouble defusing Trump now that he’s in the White House as they did all through last year’s campaign. Murray said he’s seen neither a clear understanding among leaders in Washington of how far left their base has careened in just the past few weeks nor the emergence of any infrastructure among progressive groups for turning what’s going on in the streets into concerted opposition.
“The question is: How do we respond beyond that?” Murray said. “I’m a little worried that we’re not there.”
House Democrats head to their retreat in Baltimore this week trying to come up with an answer.
“Some people on social media are already saying, ‘Yes! Impeach the guy.’ No. I think any time you’re talking about impeachment, which is historically extremely significant, that is not something you do on a whim,” said Rep. Joaquín Castro (D-Texas), explaining that he used the word himself earlier in the week as a warning of where things might go. “I think our response should be reasonable, it should not be exaggerated — but we fundamentally have to protect the integrity of the republic.”
Some of his colleagues will boycott Trump’s address before a joint session of Congress at the end of the month. Others are planning to go but come up with a way to protest that makes a splash. They’re trolling, referring to “President Bannon” in the hopes of goading Trump into sidelining Steve Bannon, his chief strategist, if he thinks people are seeing him as a puppet.
“I plan on being there at this point in time, I think it’s part of my responsibility,” said Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. “I’m there to witness and hear what he has to say, and respond in kind.”
“We are going to continue to be the bulwark against the man. We’re going to stop him at every opportunity we have,” Crowley added. “This is going to be a gift that keeps on giving in some respects.”
Democrats are mobilizing around Republican members' town halls to protest Obamacare repeal. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) is demanding that Mar-a-Lago, Trump's exclusive club in Florida, release its members list.
Some are trying other strategies of chipping away at Trump’s authority. Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) says he’s looking to hit the House staffers who worked with the White House on crafting the travel ban and signed nondisclosure agreements that he says made them into employees of the administration too. “Sounds like double-dipping to me,” Gutiérrez said in an interview off the House floor on Wednesday. “There might be a law against that.”
But Democrats readily acknowledge Trump won last year in part by sparking so many simultaneous outrages among the left that they all blended together. Trump’s White House so far is following that model...
Keep reading --- and relishing the flailing idiot leftists.
McClintock's interviewed at the video, where near the end he says, "There's an intolerance on the political left that's running very deep, and the fact that the police had to intervene is a serious indicator of the growing violence of the left --- this is very disturbing!"
Facing a packed auditorium and raucous crowd, Republican Congressman Tom McClintock on Saturday, Feb. 4, 2017, defended his party’s national agenda and voiced strong support for President Donald Trump’s disputed executive actions to scale back Obamacare, ban refugees from seven predominantly Muslim countries and build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Facing a packed auditorium and raucous crowd, Republican Rep. Tom McClintock on Saturday defended his party’s national agenda and voiced strong support for President Donald Trump’s controversial executive actions to scale back Obamacare, ban visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries and build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Vote him out,” hundreds of demonstrators chanted outside the Tower Theatre in downtown Roseville, the Republican-heavy population center of McClintock’s sprawling congressional district. Inside the theater, more than 200 people gathered for a town-hall event hosted by McClintock.
Attendees, some carrying signs that read “Resist,” “Dump Tom McTrump” and “Climate change is real,” pressed McClintock to denounce Republican plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act, acknowledge the science supporting the human causes of climate change, and oppose Trump’s executive order temporarily restricting refugee admissions to the U.S.
“I believe that order is constitutional,” said McClintock, one of several comments that elicited boos at the hourlong event.
McClintock’s visit drew hundreds of people, most of whom had come to express opposition to the new administration. Many identified themselves as liberal Democrats and progressives, while party registration in McClintock’s district – which incorporates all or part of 10 counties spanning from Tahoe to Yosemite – is solidly Republican.
“This is really all about resisting the Trump agenda,” said Wendy Wood, chairwoman of Indivisible Sierra Nevada, a local chapter of a political organization formed in response to the election. “Most of us have never participated in political activism of any sort. Something is happening here, and people here are not happy with (Trump) and McClintock. We’re here to vote them out.”
Roseville police and fire officials capped attendance inside the theater at roughly 200 people. Those left outside voiced frustration about being locked out of the theater, some saying they had driven for hours simply to see McClintock face to face.
“We just wanted to be able to ask questions of our representative and share our thoughts on key issues,” wrote Lauren Lake in an email. “I drove hours over a snowy pass to be there … we were told that the venue was at capacity and no one else would be allowed in.”
Inside the theater, McClintock took about a dozen audience questions. Some of the most passionate comments came from people who said they feared losing access to health care if Republicans press forward to repeal the Affordable Care Act without a clear replacement.
“What do you expect seniors and people with disabilities with low income to do if you take away our Medicare and Medicaid that we rely on to literally stay alive?” asked Amanda Barnes, who said she was paralyzed from her waist down after a hit-and-run accident in a crosswalk five years ago.
McClintock said his party did not yet have a replacement plan, but that there were several Republican-backed proposals still taking shape...
McClintock's a solid conservative, but he's really earning my respect here by facing down this deranged leftist mob. You had some guy a couple of weeks ago slip out the side door rather than stand up to the progressive goon squad, so McClintock's clearly showing he can take a political beating and get right back up.
I suspect I'd be pretty much completely apolitical if I was a business owner, knowing that my views would get me targeted by the left's fascist thought police.
But this dude Daniel Murphy, owner of Twelve Rounds Brewing, must've thought he enjoyed a right to free expression under the new regime. He thought wrong, and has apologized profusely (to save his business, obviously).
Do craft beer patrons have a certain political bent? Are they likely to be more liberal, moderate or conservative? Do they wear way more plaid flannel shirts than the general population?
If you’re in the hospitality industry, here’s the only answer that should matter to you: It doesn’t matter.
When it comes to political views, breweries should have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Arguing about politics, religion and conspiracy theories are simply bad for business.
Understood by most already, this simple lesson came screaming into our collective consciousness nearly two weeks ago when award-winning brewer Daniel Murphy’s personal Facebook posts leaked into the public sphere, beginning with one where he said he was “disgusted” with the Women’s March. To put it charitably, some of Murphy’s other political and social views fall well outside the bounds of polite or even reasonable political discourse.
Can you suggest that the nation’s first black president was actually a Muslim and a traitor without decimating all that good will you’ve spent months building up? Can you use racist terms for Pakistanis? Why would you even go there? All those millennial couples and their cute kids and fluffy dogs I saw sitting outside drinking beer and socializing last summer? They likely don’t want to be connected to that kind of rhetoric.
To be a successful business that optimizes profits and is good for the community, a brewery should be a welcome place for people of all walks of life and political perspectives. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment or one man’s right to give his opinion. It’s Business 101.
Is there a way out of this hole Murphy has dug himself?
I asked straight-shooting Evan Elsberry of the popular restaurant Evan’s Kitchen, which is across 57th Street. He’s been handling the food program for Twelve Rounds – you can place an order from the brewery and have Elsberry’s superb cooking delivered in minutes. Several days ago, he walked across the street to check in with Murphy.
“I told him, ‘I don’t agree with what you said, but I’m going to stand by you as a business owner,’ ” Elsberry told me. “I know the guy personally and feel bad for him. It’s a good business. He just really messed up.”
Elsberry has seen the short-term spike in attention. He’s even benefited from it.
“In the last four days, I was swamped with orders from the brewery. It’s not hurting his business yet, but it’s going to catch up to him.”
A new company, Disrupt Marketing, was so intrigued by Twelve Rounds’ predicament that company co-founder Soreath Hok, a former news producer at KCRA Channel 3, wrote a detailed Facebook post with an abundance of excellent advice. She says the brewery needs to create personal, sincere videos that address those who feel let down or insulted by Murphy’s posts. Here’s an excerpt...
This isn't the same as arguing for religious freedom. I'd be more behind this guy if he was saying he wasn't going to cater some homosexual wedding. But this is Facebook. You're just putting your views out there, throwing caution to the wind. I think he learned his lesson. He wants to stay in business. He's going to be buttoning it up.
This has to be one of the biggest laughers of the new year.
The Democrats are "capitalist"?
Well, no.
The Democrats are a quasi-Marxist socialist party that can't stand the free market. The only thing holding back leftists from nationalizing huge sections of the American economy is the historic commitment to free enterprise by the American people. Polls do show lagging support among the young for the free market, but of course these people are idiots. One of the greatest benefits of electing President Trump is the brake he puts on Democrat attacks on the free market economy. Trump's literally saving this country from ruin. And leftists hate him for it.
When President Trump ordered a vast overhaul of immigration law enforcement during his first week in office, he stripped away most restrictions on who should be deported, opening the door for roundups and detentions on a scale not seen in nearly a decade.
Up to 8 million people in the country illegally could be considered priorities for deportation, according to calculations by the Los Angeles Times. They were based on interviews with experts who studied the order and two internal documents that signal immigration officials are taking an expansive view of Trump’s directive.
Far from targeting only “bad hombres,” as Trump has said repeatedly, his new order allows immigration agents to detain nearly anyone they come in contact with who has crossed the border illegally. People could be booked into custody for using food stamps or if their child receives free school lunches.
The deportation targets are a much larger group than those swept up in the travel bans that sowed chaos at airports and seized public attention over the past week. Fewer than 1 million people came to the U.S. over the past decade from the seven countries from which most visitors are temporarily blocked.
Deportations of this scale, which has not been publicly totaled before, could have widely felt consequences: Families would be separated. Businesses catering to immigrant customers may be shuttered. Crops could be left to rot, unpicked, as agricultural and other industries that rely on immigrant workforces face labor shortages. U.S. relations could be strained with countries that stand to receive an influx of deported people, particularly in Latin America. Even the Social Security system, which many immigrants working illegally pay into under fake identification numbers, would take a hit.
The new instructions represent a wide expansion of President Obama’s focus on deporting only recent arrivals, repeat immigration violators and people with multiple criminal violations. Under the Obama administration, only about 1.4 million people were considered priorities for removal.
“We are going back to enforcement chaos — they are going to give lip service to going after criminals, but they really are going to round up everybody they can get their hands on,” said David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn. and an immigration lawyer for more than two decades...
We're not "going back to chaos." That's ridiculous. We're enforcing the last to prevent FURTHER chaos from the leftist open-borders agenda.
Two plus years of an overwrought lip-synched Vegas show for Japanese tourists and drunk bachelorettes and something finally happened worth watching. This must be how those NatGeo photographers feel after being camped in a cold wet foxhole for months on end waiting to watch rare capybaras fucking.
Britney Spears suffered a wardrobe malfunction on stage during her show when her tit almost fell out of her costume. Suffered seems about as accurate as wardrobe malfunction when discussing what was probably either a completely planned Janet Jackson halftime moment or something everybody knew was bound to happen given the cut of her outfit. Spears' has had nonstop costume rips and tears and busted seams throughout the course of her big budget gay dancer extravaganza. Her wardrobe people know their suits better than NASA engineers understand the ones wrapped around astronauts being launched into space.
Leftist UC Berkeley students and outsiders rioted last night to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos from delivering a David Horowitz Freedom Center-sponsored speech demanding the end of “sanctuary campuses” that harbor illegal aliens. Milo's address, which was canceled amid violent mob attacks, fire-setting, and wanton property destruction, had been scheduled to mark the launch of the Freedom Center’s #nosanctuarycampusforcriminals campaign.
“One thing we do know for sure: the Left is absolutely terrified of free speech and will do literally anything to shut it down,” Yiannopoulos, tech editor at Breitbart News, said after being safely evacuated from the campus.
“This is what tolerance looks like at UC Berkeley,” Mike Wright, a Berkeley College Republicans member told SFGate as smoke bombs exploded nearby. He said paint was thrown on his person. “It’s sad.”
“The so-called ‘sanctuary movement’ is a concerted effort by left-wing administrations in major cities to thwart the purposes of the Patriot Act, undermine federal immigration law, and cripple the efforts of the Department of Homeland security to protect American citizens from terrorist threats,” David Horowitz, founder and CEO of the Freedom Center, said on Jan. 31.
“Thanks to the efforts of left-wing activists and administrators, this seditious movement has now spread to our colleges and universities.”
Backed by the Freedom Center, Yiannopoulos, an outspoken gay, Jewish, Greek-born British citizen who ardently supports President Trump, was on campus to demand that federal grants to UC Berkeley be withdrawn and that university officials like UC President Janet Napolitano and Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks who endanger their students with their illegal alien-shielding policies be prosecuted.
UC President Napolitano, formerly President Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary, is under the microscope because, as head of the taxpayer-supported University of California system, she is deliberately harboring hundreds of illegal aliens attending UC system schools. She has forbidden campus police from working with immigration law enforcement and provided $5 million to aid the illegals UC is sheltering from ICE.
The University of California system even provides legal aid to illegal alien students who wish to keep breaking U.S. immigration laws.
The executive director of the University of California Undocumented Legal Services Center at the UC Davis School of Law explained to Rolling Stone in December what a sanctuary campus was.
“Basically it’s a concept that says, ‘You’re safe here, and your immigration status, we won’t ask,’” said Maria Blanco. “’We won’t turn you over. We won’t turn your records over.’”
Not all the rioters were from Berkeley.
Many of those dressed black bloc-style so police can’t identify them appear to be associated with the “antifa” movement. Antifa may be short for anti-fascist but these thugs, usually a mix of anarchists and communists, use violent fascistic tactics against their targets. These terrorists do not tolerate opposing views. Before the riots broke out those gathered carried signs that read “hate speech is not free speech.” Signs from the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PLS) also showed up in Berkeley.
Antifa is also involved in the protests and melees at airports nationwide launched in opposition to President Trump’s Executive Order 13769 which as of Jan. 27 temporarily banned visitors from a handful of terrorism-plagued Muslim nations.
The Berkeley police had reportedly been given a “stand down” order which allowed rioters to generate mayhem. Later when the police declared the throng of troublemakers an unlawful assembly and ordered those present to leave, the mob chanted “you go first!”
After leaving the campus Yiannopoulos reflected on the night’s events in a video on his Facebook page...
I gotta say this is pretty fascinating. Anarchists and communists brawling with alleged brown shirts. It's like the 1930s, although let's hope not with the same results.
The videotaped sucker punch that staggered the white nationalist Richard Spencer on Inauguration Day quickly inspired mockery on social media. But it echoed loudly in an escalating confrontation between extreme ends of the political spectrum.
With far-right groups edging into the mainstream with the rise of President Trump, self-described anti-fascists and anarchists are vowing to confront them at every turn, and by any means necessary — including violence.
In Berkeley, Calif., on Wednesday night, masked protesters set fires, smashed windows and stormed buildings on the campus of the University of California to shut down a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, an inflammatory Breitbart News editor and a right-wing provocateur already barred from Twitter. Five people were injured, administrators canceled the event, and the university police locked down the campus for hours.
That followed a bloody melee in Seattle on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, when black-clad demonstrators — their faces concealed to minimize the risk of arrest — tried to prevent a speech by Mr. Yiannopoulos at the University of Washington, and a 34-year-old anti-fascist was shot and seriously wounded by a supporter of Mr. Yiannopoulos.
The outbreaks of destruction and violence since Mr. Trump’s inauguration have earned contempt from Republicans — including Trump supporters who say it is exactly why they voted for his promises of law and order — and condemnation from Democrats like Berkeley’s mayor, Jesse Arreguín. He called Wednesday’s display “contrary to progressive values” and said it “provided the ultranationalist far right exactly the images they want” to try to discredit peaceful protesters of Mr. Trump’s policies.
But anarchists and anti-fascists, who often make up a small but disproportionately attention-getting portion of protesters, defend the mayhem they create as a necessary response to an emergency.
“Yes, what the black bloc did last night was destructive to property,” Eric Laursen, a writer in Massachusetts who has helped publicize anarchist protests, said, using another name for the black-clad demonstrators. “But do you just let someone like Milo go wherever he wants and spread his hate? That kind of argument can devolve into ‘just sit on your hands and wait for it to pass.’ And it doesn’t.”
Anarchists also say their recent efforts have been wildly successful, both by focusing attention on their most urgent argument — that Mr. Trump poses a fascist threat — and by enticing others to join their movement.
“The number of people who have been showing up to meetings, the number of meetings, and the number of already-evolving plans for future actions is through the roof,” Legba Carrefour, who helped organize the so-called Disrupt J20 protests on Inauguration Day in Washington, said in an interview.
“Gained 1,000 followers in the last week,” trumpeted @NYCAntifa, an anti-fascist Twitter account in New York, on Jan. 24. “Pretty crazy for us as we’ve been active for many years with minimal attention. SMASH FASCISM!”
The movement even claims to be finding adherents far afield of major population centers. A participant in CrimethInc, a decades-old anarchist network, pointed to rising attendance at its meetings and activity cropping up in new places like Omaha.
“The Left ignores us. The Right demonizes us,” the anarchist website It’s Going Down boasted on Twitter. “Everyday we grow stronger.”
Little known to practitioners of mainstream American politics, militant anti-fascists make up a secretive culture closely associated with anarchists. Both reject social hierarchies as undemocratic and eschew the political parties as hopelessly corrupt, according to interviews with a dozen anarchists around the country. While some anarchists espouse nonviolence, others view property damage and even physical attacks on the far right as important tactics...
They will resort to violence to shut you down. I've confronted them numerous times, but if you're going to do it, you need to do it in numbers. I'm not going out to cover another one of these events unless I've got a posse with me.
I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. Thank you for shopping through my links.
