Leftists Shut Down Bay Area Free Speech Rallies

I don't know?

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

I sure hope so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previewing the San Francisco rally, Gibson said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Jeff Jacoby noted,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.

From one of the country’s most admired political thinkers, an urgent wake-up call to American liberals to turn from the divisive politics of identity and develop a vision of our future that can persuade all citizens that they share a common destiny.

In The Once and Future Liberal, Mark Lilla offers an impassioned, tough-minded, and stinging look at the failure of American liberalism over the past two generations. Although there have been Democrats in the White House, and some notable policy achievements, for nearly 40 years the vision that Ronald Reagan offered—small government, lower taxes, and self-reliant individualism—has remained the country’s dominant political ideology. And the Democratic Party has offered no convincing competing vision in response.

Instead, as Lilla argues, American liberalism fell under the spell of identity politics, with disastrous consequences. Driven originally by a sincere desire to protect the most vulnerable Americans, the left has now unwittingly balkanized the electorate, encouraged self-absorption rather than solidarity, and invested its energies in social movements rather than in party politics.

With dire consequences. Lilla goes on to show how the left’s identity-focused individualism insidiously conspired with the amoral economic individualism of the Reaganite right to shape an electorate with little sense of a shared future and near-contempt for the idea of the common good. In the contest for the American imagination, liberals have abdicated.

Now they have an opportunity to reset. The left is motivated, and the Republican Party, led by an unpredictable demagogue, is in ideological disarray. To seize this opportunity, Lilla insists, liberals must concentrate their efforts on recapturing our institutions by winning elections. The time for hectoring is over. It is time to reach out and start persuading people from every walk of life and in every region of the country that liberals will stand up for them. We must appeal to – but also help to rebuild –  a sense of common feeling among Americans, and a sense of duty to each other.

A fiercely-argued, no-nonsense book, enlivened by Lilla’s acerbic wit and erudition, The Once and Future Liberal is essential reading for our momentous times.

Hysteria Over Monuments Metastasizes

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

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

It began with calls to remove Confederate generals.

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

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

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

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

New disputes seem to be springing up daily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See that?

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

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

Still more (FWIW).

Critics Slam Taylor Swift's Comeback Single (VIDEO)

Ms. Taylor's really not my generation of music, so I asked my oldest son what he thought of her new song. He said he hadn't listened to it yet, and that in fact he was avoiding the news and the criticism, because he didn't want to be brought down and polluted by the haters, in so many words.

In any case, at USA Today, "Some of the most ruthless digs on #LookWhatYouMadeMeDo (and there were a lot to choose from)."

Halsey for Playboy

She's some new pop star, I guess.

Nice either way.

At Taxi Driver, "Halsey for Playboy Magazine."

And at PuffHo, "Halsey on Why Posing in Playboy Doesn’t Diminish Her Feminism."

Much love to @halsey for this amazing cover for @playboy ✌ pic.twitter.com/5Jvv4ZxjEV

— ✨ARKY DIAZ✨ (@ArkyDiaz) August 17, 2017

'Newsflash. A woman can be multi-dimensional': Halsey defends choice to 'show my t**s' for Playboy - International… https://t.co/QhW3vaTjHy pic.twitter.com/YfhHY0oECx

— Nikolas Moretti (@NikolasMoretti) August 25, 2017

Kylie Jenner for V Magazine

Here, "Kylie Reveals All." (Hat Tip: Taxi Driver.)

I think that's farther than Kendall's ever gone with the "free the nipple" campaign, and frankly, Kylie's got more bodacious breasts.

More here, "Watch the footage of @KylieJenner's Nick Knight photo shoot."

President Trump Pardons Sheriff Joe Arpaio

I met Sheriff Joe in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2010. Everybody loves Sheriff Joe. The only people who don't are the treasonous racist MSM fifth columnists out to destroy our great country!

Here's the headline at NYT, via Memeorandum, "Trump Pardons Joe Arpaio, Who Became Face of Crackdown on Illegal Immigration."

I don't care what these leftist media hacks say. Sheriff Joe's a freakin' patriot.

Here's my report from 2010. I had so much fun! See, "Sheriff Joe Arpaio Headlines 'Stand With Arizona' Rally in Tempe."

Harold Bloom, The Western Canon

"What shall the individual who still desires to read attempt to read, this late in history," writes Professor Bloom, in his first chapter of The Western Canon.

He also writes, "Who reads must choose, since there is not enough time to read everything, even if one does nothing but read," which is true, although I do try.

At Amazon, Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages.

Danielle Gersh's Sunny and Warm Forecast

Hey, it's supposed to heat up into the 90s next week, just in time for my first week back to school --- wouldn't you know it?!

Here's the lovely Ms. Danielle, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Italian Americans Rally to Keep Christopher Columbus Statue (VIDEO)

I just don't know anymore.

Watch, at CBS News 2 New York, "Officials Eye Columbus Statue for Chopping Block."

And from Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "“WHEN THE GOING GETS STUPID, THE STUPID TURN PRO”: The Left Opens Fire on Columbus Statues."

Jacques Berlinerblau, Campus Confidential

I'd like to read this.

At Amazon, Jacques Berlinerblau, Campus Confidential: How College Works, or Doesn't, for Professors, Parents, and Students.

Alexandra Fuller, Quiet Until the Thaw

At Amazon, Alexandra Fuller, Quiet Until the Thaw: A Novel.

Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter.

William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

At Amazon, William Gibson, Pattern Recognition.

Douglas E. Schoen and Jessica Tarlov, America in the Age of Trump

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Douglas E. Schoen and Jessica Tarlov, America in the Age of Trump: Opportunities and Oppositions in an Unsettled World.

Nina Agdal, Hannah Jeter, Robyn Lawley, Kate Bock, and Mia Kang (VIDEO)

At Sports Illustrated Swimsuit:

Neal Stephenson, Anathem

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Neal Stephenson, Anathem.

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon.

'Fifty Shades' Star Dakota Johnson Photos Leaked

Here's Gossip Cop, "Dakota Johnson Nude Photos Hacked, Leak Online," and the hilarious concluding paragraph:

Of course, Gossip Cop will not publish any of the photos, nor will we mention the names of the sites that have posted the illegally obtained pictures. We hope other outlets will also not direct visitors to these stolen images.

Oh, right, you freakin' virtuous paragons of slut-shaming gossip porn sites you.

Drunken Stepfather has some, "DAKOTA JOHNSON SHAVING HER FRIENDS LEG INSTAGRAM ARTIST SHOOT OF THE DAY."

And at the Fappening, "Dakota Johnson Leaked (21 Photos)."

Leftist Tech Companies Rely on Discredited SPLC to Demonetize Conservative Critics of Islam (VIDEO)

You know, it's not a lot of money, but my Amazon affiliates blogging has been keeping me interested and returning to the blog day after day. Frankly, the books and intellectual stimulation have been the fun for me this summer. Political blogging has been so-so, and I'd probably be doing a lot less of it if my side gig with the Amazon books were to go away.

I'd been thinking about how compared to Google (AdSense, etc.), Amazon's been pretty hands off. I appreciate it and I think that approach deserves respect and promotion. But now I come to find out that even Amazon's been in on the "demonetizing" attacks against un-PC views. That bums me out. Not because I'm going to lose my side business. But because I was naive to think that the Bezos people were holding themselves to a higher standard, staying above the fray of hateful leftist politics. Boy, not so much it turns out.

Check this mind-boggling story of complete media lack of self-awareness, at ProPublica. Really, these people, and I'm talking now about the journalists writing the story, think they're doing something noble and just when in fact what they're doing is ignorant and evil.

Here's another reason why I hate politics right now.

See, at the safe link, "Despite Disavowals, Leading Tech Companies Help Extremist Sites Monetize Hate":

Most tech companies have policies against working with hate websites. Yet a ProPublica survey found that PayPal, Stripe, Newsmax and others help keep more than half of the most-visited extremist sites in business.

Because of its “extreme hostility toward Muslims,” the website Jihadwatch.org is considered an active hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. The views of the site’s director, Robert Spencer, on Islam led the British Home Office to ban him from entering the country in 2013.

But its designation as a hate site hasn’t stopped tech companies — including PayPal, Amazon and Newsmax — from maintaining partnerships with Jihad Watch that help to sustain it financially. PayPal facilitates donations to the site. Newsmax — the online news network run by President Donald Trump’s close friend Chris Ruddy — pays Jihad Watch in return for users clicking on its headlines. Until recently, Amazon allowed Jihad Watch to participate in a program that promised a cut of any book sales that the site generated. All three companies have policies that say they don’t do business with hate groups.

Jihad Watch is one of many sites that monetize their extremist views through relationships with technology companies. ProPublica surveyed the most visited websites of groups designated as extremist by either the SPLC or the Anti-Defamation League. We found that more than half of them — 39 out of 69 — made money from ads, donations or other revenue streams facilitated by technology companies. At least 10 tech companies played a role directly or indirectly in supporting these sites.

Traditionally, tech companies have justified such relationships by contending that it’s not their role to censor the Internet or to discourage legitimate political expression. Also, their management wasn’t necessarily aware that they were doing business with hate sites because tech services tend to be automated and based on algorithms tied to demographics.

In the wake of last week’s violent protest by alt-right groups in Charlottesville, more tech companies have disavowed relationships with extremist groups. During just the last week, six of the sites on our list were shut down. Even the web services company Cloudflare, which had long defended its laissez-faire approach to political expression, finally ended its relationship with the neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer last week.

“I can’t recall a time where the tech industry was so in step in their response to hate on their platforms,” said Oren Segal, director of the ADL’s Center on Extremism. “Stopping financial support to hate sites seems like a win-win for everyone.”

But ProPublica’s findings indicate that some tech companies with anti-hate policies may have failed to establish the monitoring processes needed to weed out hate sites. PayPal, the payment processor, has a policy against working with sites that use its service for “the promotion of hate, violence, [or] racial intolerance.” Yet it was by far the top tech provider to the hate sites with donation links on 23 sites, or about one-third of those surveyed by ProPublica. In response to ProPublica’s inquiries, PayPal spokesman Justin Higgs said in a statement that the company “strives to conscientiously assess activity and review accounts reported to us.”

After Charlottesville, PayPal stopped accepting payments or donations for several high-profile white nationalist groups that participated in the march. It posted a statement that it would remain “vigilant on hate, violence & intolerance.” It addresses each case individually, and “strives to navigate the balance between freedom of expression” and the “limiting and closing” of hate sites, it said.

After being contacted by ProPublica, Newsmax said it was unaware that the three sites that it had relationships with were considered hateful. “We will review the content of these sites and make any necessary changes after that review,” said Andy Brown, chief operating officer of Newsmax.

Amazon spokeswoman Angie Newman said the company had previously removed Jihad Watch and three other sites identified by ProPublica from its program sharing revenue for book sales, which is called Amazon Associates. When ProPublica pointed out that the sites still carried working links to the program, she said that it was their responsibility to remove the code. “They are no longer paid as an Associate regardless of what links are on their site once we remove them from the Associates Program,” she said...

Still more (FWIW).

(And recall the SPLC has been so widely discredited, even on the left, that's it's beyond logic that these idiots at ProPublica would be so reliant on it.)

And from earlier, "Pamela Geller Banned (Then Restored) by PayPal."

Finally, here's Robert Spencer on Tucker's show the other night:

Margaret George, The Autobiography of Henry VIII

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Margaret George, The Autobiography of Henry VIII - With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers: A Novel.

Margaret George, Mary Queen of Scotland

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Margaret George, Mary Queen of Scotland and The Isles: A Novel.

Violent Leftist Who Attacked Richard Maxwell at Laguna Beach Rally Tried to Flee the State

Following-up from last night, "Black Conservative Richard Maxwell 'Sucker Punched' for Supporting President Trump (VIDEO)."

The L.A. Times picked up on this story, so I'll give them that.

See, "Counter-protester who allegedly 'sucker-punched' Trump supporter at O.C. rally tried to flee state, police say."

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

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

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

— The Spectator (@spectator) August 23, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still more.

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

Peaceful Confederate Guy Has to Be Escorted Away by Police to Literally Save His Life After Angry Leftist Sticks Two Middle-Fingers in His Face for Half-an-Hour. Who's the Villain?

Of course, the Confederate guy's the villain. But he's actually the way more sympathetic figure here. Seriously. Unless you're a race-obsessed leftist MSM "journalist." Then the angry profane leftist bitch sticking the finger in the guy's face for 30 minutes non-stop is the hero.

We are seriously f*cked up in this country. Just wow.

At WaPo, "He wore Confederate dress to Charlottesville. He got two middle fingers and possible expulsion from college."

It's not "possible expulsion." He got to boot from his so-called "Christian" college. Peaceful protester standing up for his ancestors' heritage. Said his stand wasn't about race at all. And look what happened to him.

If any city is tearing down statues of racists, might I suggest you use this figure study for erecting their replacements? pic.twitter.com/Ddp4n4TdfU

— (((David Lytle))) (@davitydave) August 19, 2017

Danielle Gersh's Increasing Temperatures Forecast

Tomorrow's my last full day of summer down time. I have "College Days" at LBCC on Friday, and then the new semester starts Monday.

Well, it's been nice, heh.

Here's the lovely Ms. Danielle, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa.

Black Conservative Richard Maxwell 'Sucker Punched' for Supporting President Trump (VIDEO)

This should be on #FakeNews CNN.

Maxwell is black, so no. Doesn't fit the narrative.

At CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Steven Press, Rogue Empires

At Amazon, Steven Press, Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa.

ICYMI: Omar El Akkad, American War

I personally feel like we're in a civil war.

And the conditions are so ripe for hot war, not a cold war of cultural enemies.

It's worth posting this once again.

At Amazon, Omar El Akkad, American War.

Trump Supporters in Their Own Words

Melissa McEwan is not pleased:

Enough already. These people made a terrible, destructive, dangerous decision in voting for Donald Trump. And now the media wants to continually give them a platform to talk about that decision, as if they might have made it out of ignorance about who Trump is (nope!) or as if there is some value to letting them speak endlessly about their choice to cast a vote for a corrupt, bigoted, serial sex predator (also nope!) or as if there is something to be gleaned from mining the thoughts of people who insistently support an authoritarian bully who they have convinced themselves doesn't hold them in utter contempt (a third time nope).

There is no value in any of it. Enough.

She blocked me on Twitter years ago, of course.

But see the Guardian, "'He's anti-left, anti-PC, anti-stupid': Trump supporters in their own words."

CNN's Ana Navaro Angrily Defends Tweet Claiming President Trump Has Dementia (VIDEO)

Click through to watch, at Free Beacon, "Ana Navaro Angrily Defends Tweet Suggesting Trump Has Dementia: ‘I Didn’t Say He Has It’."

Actually, she tweeted that "he has it":

Only possible defensible explanation for Trump's disgusting, unpresidential, narcissistic behavior, would be early-on-set dementia. Maybe.

— Ana Navarro (@ananavarro) August 23, 2017

Bernard Cornwell, The Pale Horseman

This one's the second entry in Cornwell's the Saxon Chronicles Series.

I found one of the books while out shopping last week. Interestingly, Barnes and Noble doesn't carry the series indoors. You have to order online.

I'll build up my collection this fall. I've got a lot of other things to read right now, but this is great!

At Amazon, Bernard Cornwell, The Pale Horseman (The Saxon Chronicles Series #2).

Olivia Culpo Bikini Pics

At Popaholic, "Olivia Culpo Knocks It Out of the Park With Her Jaw-Dropping Bikini Sexiness."

She's really hot. Maybe I should be posting Ms. Olivia more often, lol.

On Twitter:

Rhode Island girl pic.twitter.com/iA2Z0tZIVo

— Olivia Culpo (@oliviaculpo) July 27, 2017

It's coming... #PLTxOliviaCulpo 😍🌹🔥🔥 @oliviaculpo pic.twitter.com/lXrKc765at

— PrettyLittleThing (@OfficialPLT) August 15, 2017

Cherry stained lip 🍒 pic.twitter.com/z2cDruZ8Eh

— Olivia Culpo (@oliviaculpo) August 17, 2017

💋🌎 pic.twitter.com/cnweBL0ant

— Olivia Culpo (@oliviaculpo) August 20, 2017

Damn..... pizza pic.twitter.com/4mUHvJRCmW

— Olivia Culpo (@oliviaculpo) August 20, 2017

Lucy Collett on Snapchat

I'm not on Snapchat.

Shoot, I'm not on Instagram or any of these other ultra hip platforms.

That's probably for the better, lol. Society's getting too dumbed down as it is.

In any case, I guess Snapchat permits nudity (whereas not so at Instagram).

At Taxi Driver, "Lucy Collett Topless on her Snap Chat."

She goes by "Lucy Vixen" nowadays apparently, and she's on Twitter as well.

'The new leaders [of the Los Angeles Times] take over a news organization with flagging morale after years of management changes on top of huge shifts in consumer behavior that have roiled the entire newspaper industry.

Following-up on my post from Monday, "Enough is Enough: President Trump's a Threat to Our Democratic Institutions."

Perhaps the new leadership at LAT will put two and two together and figure out that wall-to-wall Trump hatred isn't the ticket to a successful business model.

Of course, they won't learn a thing. My bet is the new leadership makes the same editorial mistakes as the old leadership. Leftist Los Angeles will kill its own newspaper.

See, FWIW, "Ross Levinsohn is named the new publisher and CEO of the L.A. Times as top editors are ousted."

ESPN Pulls Announcer Robert Lee from UVA Football Game Because American Politics is FUBAR

Here's Clay Travis, at Outkick the Coverage, "MSESPN Pulls Asian Announcer Named Robert Lee Off UVa Game to Avoid Offending Idiots ." (Via Memeorandum.)

I can't even any more. Like I've said before, I can't even.

And Travis was on Tucker's last night:

Lauren Southern on Removal of Confederate Statues (VIDEO)

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

Steven Ozment, A Mighty Fortress

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Steven Ozment, A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People.

[ADDED: I put this one on order, as I'm interested in the "German barbarians" who fought against the Roman legions in antiquity, as I mentioned earlier.]

Democrat 'Nazi Hunters' Gone Wild

You gotta read this.

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

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

Jo Beth Taylor Bikini Pics

She's an Australian television personality, at Drunken Stepfather, "Jo Beth Taylor Bikini on the Beach."

Also on Instagram, of course.

Steven Pressfield, Tides of War

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Steven Pressfield, Tides of War: A Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War.

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

This one's a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

At Amazon, Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel.

Fifteen #Antifa Photos You'll Never See in the Far-Left 'Mainstream' Media

From Doug Ross, at Director Blue, "15 Antifa Photos You'll Never See in Legacy Media."

"There are no words..."#Antifa pic.twitter.com/iv3LpZcto4

— Larry Elder (@larryelder) August 20, 2017

Bushnell Legend L-Series Binoculars

At Amazon, Bushnell Legend L-Series 10x42mm Binoculars (Deal of the Day: $130.99 and FREE Shipping).

Plus, check out all of Today's Deals.

Also, Hershey's 36ct. Plus 1 Bonus Bar (37 Bars Total).

And, LÖFBERG'S KHARISMA: Roast Level 4/5, Whole Bean Coffee, 400g.

More, Seiko SSB031 Men's Chronograph Stainless Steel Case Watch.

Here, Rawlings ST5 Horween Leather Official Size Football: RAWLINGS SOFT TOUCH FOOTBALL.

Still more, Mountain House Just In Case...Classic Assortment Bucket.

And, KIND Healthy Grains Granola Bars, Oats & Honey with Toasted Coconut, Gluten Free, 1.2oz Bars, 15 Count.

BONUS: Carlo D'Este, Bitter Victory: The Battle for Sicily, 1943.

Mizzou Enrollment Plunges

I wonder why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Berkeley of the Midwest." Ouch.

Still more.

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.

Alison Weir, The Life of Elizabeth

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Alison Weir, The Life of Elizabeth.

Female Trump Voters Defend President Trump's #Charlottesville Response (VIDEO)

NYT had this last week, "Deal Breaker for Trump’s Supporters? Nope."

Interesting.

And watch, at CBS News This Morning:

Enough is Enough: President Trump's a Threat to Our Democratic Institutions

And to think, I still subscribe to this rag of a paper. Don't ask why. I mostly just read the sports and entertainment pages nowadays. I'll blog the occasional front-page story as well. But you can see my exasperation.

From the idiot editors at LAT, "Enough is Enough." (They've been running a year-long series of editorial arguing the president's not fit for office. Yeah, we have the First Amendment, but it's still treasonous. The leftist media's been mounting an attempted coup.)

MiniJello in Instagram

Here, "MiniJello is a student at the University of Delaware and her boobs are so big that she has garnered almost 100 thousand followers on Instagram!"

She' seen taking a selfie with Bill Murray, who is a cool guy, lol.

Helen Hunt Bikini on the Beach

At Taxi Driver, "Helen Hunt in Bikini While Changing on the Beach."

10 Sailors Missing as USS John S. McCain Crashes Into Oil Tanker East of Singapore (VIDEO)

At the official Pacific Fleet Headlines, "USS John S. McCain collides with merchant ship near Strait of Malacca" (via Memeorandum).

"10 sailors missing" likely means "10 sailors trapped below the water line and presumed dead," but I'll update. Either way, it's unconscionable. This is like Groundhog's Day for the Navy. It's unacceptable.

University of Texas Removes Confederate Statues

The Austin campus is the flagship of the UT system. Authorities swept down in the cover of night to seize the statues from history.

At the Texas Tribune, via Memeorandum, "UT-Austin removes Confederate statues in the middle of the night."

And at USA Today, "University of Texas removes Confederate statues from campus."

Gareth Sampson, Rome Spreads Her Wings

At Amazon, Gareth Sampson, Rome Spreads Her Wings: Territorial Expansion Between the Punic Wars.