More Than 70 Percent of Republicans Approve of President Trump's Response to #Charlotteville

I didn't check the poll, from Brad Parscale, but since leftist mass-media polls have been slamming the president's response, I'll bet this America First survey nails it.

Trump Republican approval to Charlottesville 70%+ in swing states. Only 17% disapprove. #FakeNews just pushing their agenda. #BetterDataWins pic.twitter.com/zyHvtB051O

— Brad Parscale (@parscale) August 21, 2017

Out in Paper: J. Kael Weston, The Mirror Test

*BUMPED.*

In paperback, available at Amazon, J. Kael Weston, The Mirror Test: America at War in Iraq and Afghanistan.

G.J. Meyer, The Tudors

*BUMPED.*

G.J. Meyer, The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

*BUMPED.*

I don't see copies of Thomas Pynchon's books when I'm out shopping at used bookstores. But he's regularly cited in jacket blurbs and his stuff comes up on Amazon, in the "what others bought" prompts, and so forth. In any case, I'll keep looking while I'm out and about.

Meanwhile, at Amazon, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow.

Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

I finally picked up my copy.

And available at Amazon, Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (National Book Award Winner) (Oprah's Book Club).

Evelyn Taft's Warm-up Forecast

Well, we keep hearing it's going to warm up, but it's been so mild this summer it's crazy. I guess I shouldn't complain. No doubt we'll get a nasty intolerable heat wave in September, and I've got to be teaching. Sometimes the air conditioning in the classrooms isn't so great. You can't set the thermostat. So, students open the windows and that makes it worse by the afternoon.

In any case, school starts next Monday. I'm enjoying my last week of lollygagging, lol.

Here's the lovely Ms. Evelyn, for KCAL 9 News Los Angeles:

Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

Radical Leftists Are Never Considered 'Fringe'

Here's this, at the far-left NYT (safe link), "The Showdown Over How We Define Fringe Views in America":

Today in the United States, sweeping majorities of the public say they support fair housing laws and the ideal of integrated schools. Nine in 10 say they would back a black candidate for president from their own party, and the same say they approve of marriage between blacks and whites. That last issue has undergone one of the greatest transformations in polling over the last 50 years. In 1960, just 4 percent of Americans approved.

More than a triumph over private prejudice, these numbers reflect changing social norms. The country hasn’t extinguished racism. But society — universities, employers, cultural institutions, the military — has made clearer over time that people who hold racist views had better nurse them off in the corner.

But these norms may be fraying. Since the last presidential election, and particularly since white supremacists rallied this month, unmasked, in Charlottesville, Va., the line between acceptable and ostracized views has started to become less stark. When President Trump declined to condemn white supremacists more forcefully, he ignited a fight that at its core is about how we define norms in America: Who gets to be part of civil society, and whose views belong on the fringe?

That fight is being waged by opposing protesters across the country and by pundits daily on TV. The president’s critics fear that he is inviting white supremacists out of the corner, helping ideas that have become widely reviled in America to be redefined as reasonable opinions — just part of the discussion.

“They are explicitly trying to do that,” Tina Fetner, a sociologist at McMaster University in Ontario, said of members of white supremacist groups. Until recently, they were ignored. But now the president is repeating their memes and the distorted versions of history that prop up their views, she said. As a result, the news media is broadly covering them, too.

“This is exactly the process of how social change happens,” Ms. Fetner said. “It’s not because all of a sudden there is more racism now than there was a few weeks ago. It’s that the absolute condemnation of those most abhorrent views is crumbling away because the president isn’t fulfilling that role.”

Ms. Fetner has studied the transformation in views on gay rights and same-sex marriage. The shifts around race and gender similarly reflect not just widening acceptance of equality, but also the rising condemnation of anyone who vocally opposes it.

Polls don’t necessarily capture how people truly feel; they capture what people are willing to say to a pollster. But the idea that some people might lie in surveys illustrates how social norms work. And political scientists suspect that part of what Mr. Trump has done, through his anti-immigrant and nativist appeals, is encourage people who might have kept silent in the past about their racist views to express them in public.

“For all these years, this is a group of people that’s been very bitter about the fact that they feel like they can’t speak,” said Sarah Sobieraj, a sociologist at Tufts. “It’s not just that their policies haven’t been popular.” And then Mr. Trump says similar things, with a powerful platform, without apology.

When norms of acceptable behavior and speech start to shift, it can disturb the shared beliefs, values and symbols that make up our culture. “It’s really all of those things that we’re watching right now — they’re all up for discussion,” Ms. Sobieraj said...

This, of course, is all B.S., because it's only the alleged "alt-right" whose views are considered "fringe" and unacceptable. You never get wall-to-wall coverage of major stories like just last week when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's son stated that radical leftists are the far bigger threat today. (See the Times of Israel, "Yair Netanyahu says leftists more dangerous than neo-Nazis.")

As I've said for years, the Democrats' motto is "no enemies on the left," and that motto is now the default position of all the major actors of the institutional left. See John Fund, at NRO (via Memeorandum), "‘No Enemies on the Left’ Is Still the Mantra of Too Many Liberals."

I haven't been following politics, or blogging politics, all that much this last couple of weeks. And you can see why. We're in the middle of an all-out war on the Trump administration and his supporters, and there's no depth the leftist mass media won't sink in its campaign against truth and decency.

Radical leftists are the real threat to American freedom, prosperity, and security. And to defeat the radical left, you have to defeat all the institutions of cultural, economic, and political domination now working against traditional America. It's a cold civil war at this point, but that's just temporary. Regular folks will only take so much before they put up a fight. And as the radical left is never satisfied (as evidenced by the current leftist campaign to remove Confederate statues from the public sphere across the country), there comes a time when you have to stand up and be held to account for your values.

That's where we are today in America. There will be blood.

Faith Goldy's Statement on #Charlottesville (VIDEO)

It turns out she made a final video at the Rebel before leaving the outlet.

Following-up, "So, the Rebel Media's Having Some Problems..."

So, the Rebel Media's Having Some Problems...

Following-up from the other day, "Faith Goldy Fired from Rebel Media."

I just saw this Reuters piece, linked at Mediagazer, "Canada's conservative Rebel Media site down after service cut." And reading it I find that, in addition to Goldy, "Several other contributors have left the online publication over the past week and some prominent conservative Canada politicians have also sought to distance themselves from the site .... The defections include co-founder Brian Lilley, who according to the Globe and Media was uncomfortable with the site's increasing harsh tone and growing association with the likes of white nationalist Richard Spencer."

Oh, ahem, that's pretty major.

So, googling around I see this piece at the Daily Caller, "Rebel Media Implodes" (safe link):

It’s chaos this week at Rebel Media, one of the few conservative media resources available in Canada.

In the last week, the news service has lost at least four employees to resignation and another to a firing while Rebel founder and editor-in-chief Ezra Levant now says he is being blackmailed over alleged misuse of fundraising dollars.

And forget the November cruise where Levant promised up close and personal interaction between Rebel personalities and supporters. Norwegian Cruise Lines is no longer sponsoring the Caribbean voyage, citing the Rebel’s politics being “inconsistent” with their own vision of the world.

New Canadian Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer cancelled a Friday interview with the Rebel, citing in a statement the need to change the “editorial directions” of the news service.

The cancellation just the latest in a series of corporate rebuffs that have hurt Rebel Media’s advertising base.

The trouble all started last weekend when headline reporter Faith Goldy — fired on Thursday — was covering the Charlottesville protest. Her on-scene commentary was perceived as favorable to the white supremacists that leadership candidates in the newly-minted United Conservative Party of Alberta began to complain and insist that the party distance itself from The Rebel.

Levant sent a memo to supporters — and obtained by The Daily Caller — on Tuesday that disaowed any support for the alt-right; but it was not enough to satisfy malcontents within the organization.

Co-founder and commentator Brain Lilley quit on Wednesday. That resignation was followed by the departures of contributors Barbara Kay and John Robson.

Levant announced Thursday that provocative right-wing commentator Gavin McInnes had also left the company.

Now Levant says he is being blackmailed by former British contributor Caolan Robertson, who released a video on Thursday on YouTube that alleges Rebel Media has been conducting dishonest fundraising campaigns for the express purposes of raising money for the organization and increasing into database...

More.

And see Ezra Levant himself, at the Rebel, "Blackmail: Setting the record straight."

It's hard out there.

Pamela Geller Banned (Then Restored) by PayPal

If anyone knows it's a multi-front war over the battlespace, it's Pamela.

See, "EXCELSIOR! PAYPAL RESTORES AFDI."

.@PayPal banned me. It's like pre-war Germany. Leftists run amok. #Boycottpaypalhttps://t.co/QxQQ0XrQzi pic.twitter.com/ayUixhMW3Z

— Pamela Geller (@PamelaGeller) August 21, 2017

Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

At Amazon, Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (50th Anniversary Edition).

What #PresidentTrump Gets Right About #NATO

This is great!

From Professor Michael Mandelbaum, at Foreign Affairs, "Pay Up, Europe":

Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, has a point about Europe and NATO. In May, in a speech at the alliance’s headquarters, in Brussels, he told his fellow leaders that “NATO members must finally contribute their fair share.” In July, he repeated the warning in Warsaw. “Europe must do more,” he said.

European leaders may find these demands grating, especially given Trump’s unpopularity among their constituents, but they should heed them. In recent years, Europe has become a dangerous place. In search of domestic support, Russian President Vladimir Putin has turned to aggression abroad, invading Ukraine and intervening in Syria. Since any one military adventure can provide only a temporary popularity boost, Putin will always need new victims. That makes him an ongoing threat. Just when NATO has once again become necessary for Europe’s security, however, Trump’s election has thrown the future of the U.S. role in the alliance into doubt.

For these reasons, Trump is right: to strengthen NATO and encourage the United States to continue its commitment to European security, the alliance’s European members should contribute more. Just as important for European and Western security, however, is for the United States to lead other multilateral initiatives to defend the interests and values that North America and Europe have in common. Without that leadership, Europe—and the rest of the world—will be a harsher place.

OLD MISTAKES

For the two and a half decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the word that candidate Trump used to describe NATO—“obsolete”—was largely accurate. It no longer is. In 2014, Russia put an end to the post–Cold War European peace. It invaded Ukraine, backed pro-Russian politicians in eastern European countries, and has since meddled in elections in the United States and France. This renewed aggression stems from Putin’s need for public support to sustain the kleptocracy over which he presides. During his first two terms as president, from 2000 to 2008, the skyrocketing price of oil, Russia’s largest export, allowed Putin to buy popularity. But in 2014, two years after he returned to the presidency, the price of oil collapsed. He was forced to turn to the only other reliable source of support at his disposal: aggressive nationalism. That year, in response to a popular uprising in Ukraine, known as the Euromaidan revolution, that deposed the corrupt, pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, Putin launched an invasion, initially disguised as a spontaneous reaction by local forces. Russian troops seized the Crimean Peninsula and began a campaign to support pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s eastern provinces.

Putin claimed that Russia’s actions were necessary because the Euromaidan revolution stemmed from a Western plot to isolate, humiliate, and ultimately destroy Russia. The Russian public largely believed him. His approval ratings rose sharply, and then got a further boost from his intervention in the Syrian civil war on the side of the brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Although Putin and his regime bear the primary responsibility for the return of war to Europe, the West, particularly the United States, has unintentionally helped bring about this dangerous state of affairs. In the 1990s, NATO expanded eastward, against the wishes of Russians across the political spectrum, even those favorably disposed to the West, and in spite of earlier assurances by Western leaders to their Soviet and, later, Russian counterparts that no such expansion would occur.

The West also pursued other policies to which Russia objected in vain, including the U.S.-led wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq and the unilateral U.S. withdrawal in 2002 from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an agreement that had restricted the number of missile defense systems the Soviet Union and the United States could build. Together, these initiatives created a constituency for Putin’s claim, used to justify his aggressive foreign policies, that the West was pursuing an anti-Russian campaign that he was acting to thwart.

Whereas NATO expansion mobilized Russia, it tranquilized the West. To gain domestic acceptance of the policy, Western governments portrayed it as a harmless gesture of goodwill made by an organization that was transforming itself from a defensive multinational army into a benign club of democracies. Expansion, its sponsors claimed, would require no exertion or expense on the part of current NATO members. Nor would Russia object to it, they added, in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary. These false claims have left the ultimate arbiters of NATO’s fate—the voters of the alliance’s member countries—unprepared for the renewed threat in Europe and the need for increased efforts to meet it...

Keep reading.

Demonstrators in Laguna Beach Decry Racism (VIDEO)

Normally, I'd go down to these local protests and take photos for my blog. But I quit covering these things after radical leftists physically attacked me in Anaheim a few years back. Unless I have my own posse as a security detail, I can't attend. It's too dangerous (and I'm too well-known, and thus targeted).

In any case, at LAT (FWIW), "Counter-protesters swarm rally against illegal immigration in Laguna Beach":

With protesters and counter-protesters facing off in tense confrontations across the country this weekend in the wake of the deadly clash in Charlottesville, Va., activists in Orange County wanted to try something different.

An “America First!” rally against illegal immigration was scheduled for Sunday evening. Counter-protesters, including the city’s mayor, staged their own protest but scheduled it a day earlier.

“As we’re constantly reminded to act and not react, we’re also reminded not to serve the racists’ purpose and provide them with a platform to spread their hatred,” organizers of the Saturday event wrote on Facebook.

To the several hundred protesters who showed up Saturday, Laguna Beach Mayor Toni Iseman said: “Tell your friends that being here today means you won’t be dancing with the bad guys tomorrow.”

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“They want a fight; we’re not going to engage,” Iseman said.

Still, hundreds of counter-protesters showed up anyway at the “America First!” rally Sunday evening. A police spokesman estimated the crowd of protesters and counter-protesters grew to about 2,500 — only a few dozen in that crowd were there for the “America First!” rally, billed as a vigil for victims of crimes committed by immigrants in the U.S. illegally.

The protests remained largely peaceful, if tense and loud, for much of the evening. As of 8:30 p.m., police had made two arrests; one counter-protester was arrested after shoving a Trump supporter, another for disturbing the peace with a knife. It was not immediately clear which side the person with a knife was protesting.

Shortly before 9:30 p.m., as the protests wound down, police escorted the “America First!” group out of the area. Police declared the event an unlawful assembly and ordered the crowd to disperse.

Crowds started gathering hours before the planned protest. The modest cluster of anti-immigration demonstrators met in a circle on the beach, separated by the boardwalk and a phalanx of police officers in riot gear and on horseback from hundreds of counter-protesters chanting and drumming from the other side. Some yelled insults between the officers’ legs.

Waving signs that read “Curb your Nazism,” protesters on one side shouted, “Immigrants welcome here” and “Hey hey, ho ho, white supremacy’s got to go.”

"It's ridiculous. I don't understand this. They're the ones with all the hate," said Jesse Hernandez, who was attending the “America First!” rally. “It's just a vigil of patriots that recognize what illegal immigration has done to some Americans."

One of his fellow “America First!” protesters yelled, "We're not Nazis!" and said what upsets him the most is that people don't understand the difference between people like him and extremists. "There are no Nazis here," he said, shaking his head.

About 200 officers from Laguna Beach, Anaheim, Newport Beach and Irvine were at the rally to try to ensure that the protests would not erupt in violence. Orange County sheriff’s deputies on horseback were also separating the crowds.

Laguna Beach police spokesman Jim Cota said authorities strategized to spread protesters along the length of the beach rather than have them build toward the waterfront...

More.

Jennifer Delacruz Enjoying Summer

Following-up, "Jennifer Delacruz's Monday Forecast."

Well, since I've been lagging on my Ms. Jennifer blogging, here's a selfie from her weekend recreation activities. What a lady!

San Diego summertime ☀️🦀#SanDiegoWX pic.twitter.com/OUFub0pP7q

— Jennifer Delacruz (@10NewsJen) August 19, 2017

Jennifer Delacruz's Monday Forecast

ABC 10 San Diego uploads these weather videos quite late, otherwise I'd be posting my lovely Ms. Jennifer in the evenings.

No matter. She's the best!

Still quite mild this August, although it should clear up later today enough to view the eclipse.

Bonnie Rochman, The Gene Machine

Following-up, "The Disturbing, Eugenics-Like Reality Unfolding in Iceland."

At Amazon, Bonnie Rochman, The Gene Machine: How Genetic Technologies Are Changing the Way We Have Kids--and the Kids We Have.

The Disturbing, Eugenics-Like Reality Unfolding in Iceland

At Quartz:

Recently, a CBS news crew traveled to Iceland, producing a report titled “Inside the country where Down syndrome is disappearing.” As much as it sounds like it, the headline is not clickbait or hyperbole: In Iceland, nearly every women who undergoes prenatal testing and whose fetus receives a diagnosis of Down syndrome decides to end her pregnancy. Each year, according to their sources, only a child or two is born with Down syndrome in Iceland.

Up to 85% of pregnant women in Iceland choose to take prenatal testing. The specific test in question, which CBS calls the “combination test,” takes into account ultrasound images, a blood draw, and a mother’s age to determine the likelihood that a fetus has Down syndrome. (Older mothers are more likely to have babies with Down syndrome because chromosomal errors are more likely as women age.)

In essence, pregnant women in Iceland—and presumably their partners—are saying that life with disability is not worth living. It is one thing to decide that a child who will never walk, talk, feed herself, or engage with caregivers may not have a good quality of life. But children with Down syndrome do not fit this description. If a woman doesn’t want to have a child with Down syndrome, their bar for what qualifies as a life worth living is set quite high. Are babies who are born deaf destined to lead a worthwhile life? What about babies with cleft palates, which can be corrected but leave a visible scar?

Here’s the interesting thing: Down syndrome, or Trisomy 21 as it is also called, is actually one of the less severe chromosomal conditions. Unlike many other trisomies (genetic conditions in which a person has three copies of a chromosome instead of the standard two), it’s compatible with life.

People with Down syndrome have an extra copy of their 21st chromosome, which causes intellectual delays and readily identifiable facial features such as almond-shaped eyes. But the way that Down syndrome expresses itself in an individual can be highly variable. About half of babies born with Down syndrome have heart defects that require surgical correction. Some children with Down syndrome grow up to be adults who go to college and get married; others never live independently...

More.

Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl.

Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII

At Amazon, Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII.