The murder of Robert Kennedy

Setting up George Papadopoulos

JUDGE ROY MOORE, FALSE ACCUSATIONS, AND THE FOG OF POLITICAL WAR

In the bipartisan rush to destroy Roy Moore, here is a defense of him and his reputation. 

The fact is that Roy Moore is an evangelical Christian of the kind that's disliked by the Establishment of both parties and hated by the Ruling Class.  The only people who really like him are, in Hillary Clinton's words: "deplorables." 

It's long but worth a read because so much of what we hear about Moore is either not credible or simply untrue.

I have seen multiple posts by people claiming various versions of the following statement: “Roy Moore has been credibly accused of sexual assault by multiple women who have nothing to gain from accusing him. Their accounts have been corroborated.”

This is false on many levels. Anyone interested in living in a fair society needs to call the bluff of ANYONE who posts such statements, even if you like them. You can be professional and objective (not necessarily polite or civil) but you must rebuke people for engaging in this kind of clever deceit.

1. The word “credible” has to mean something

The charges against Roy Moore are not credible by any standard. The accusations have come through the filter of journalists, publicists, or lawyers, who exercised total control over the content of statements released to the public. These journalists are overseen by editors. So the accusations are well edited, but this actually makes them less credible, because the incoherent content of the accusations conflicts with the highly professionalized tone, leading us to suspect that the accusations we have heard are not transparent memories shared by a disinterested person (that would make them more credible)–but rather, doctored, coached, and rehearsed scripts colored by people who were from the beginning motivated by considerations related to their own professional standing as commentators, advocates, and lobbyists. Let’s take a look at the content of the “accusations.”

All but three of them involve no hint of wrongdoing at all; they present a portrait of Roy Moore as a single man in his thirties courting eligible young women and showing restraint and chivalry.

Keep in mind that the UVA Fraternity Rape scandal and the Duke Lacrosse rape scandals were both supposed to be credible, corroborated, and published by reputable news sources.  Both were total fabrications dressed  up by partisans for political purposes.

Rand Paul Assaulted At His Kentucky Home by Trump Hating Democrat

Rene Albert Boucher, 59, was arrested and charged with one count of assault in the fourth degree. Paul, a Republican, suffered minor injuries in the attack, details of which are still unknown.

Kentucky State Board of Election voting records list Boucher as a registered Democrat. A person with the same name also works as an anesthesiologist in Bowling Green.

Paul was also on the field when a Bernie supporter tried to assassinate Republicans on the ball field.

Media fear Trump will inspire violence against reporters

Many in the national media are worried that President Trump's continued broadsides against the press will inspire violence against reporters, even as vocal opponents of the White House on the Left have encouraged assault or directly attacked some journalists.

Named among those  quoted who fear violence from Trump supporters are NY Times Jim Rutenberg, Jim VandeHei, founder of the news website Axios, Jeffrey Toobin, a writer for the New Yorker and a CNN commentator, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff.

To date, more than two years after he launched his campaign and seven months after his inauguration, there is no clear evidence linking Trump's rhetoric to any violence against reporters.

But a Bernie Sanders supporter and ardent Democrat attacked a group of Republican congressmen, nearly killing one.  This attempt at real political assassination has disappeared from the press coverage as if it never happened.  

Reporters have much more to fear from Leftist rioters like the Antifa gangs. Yet they never voice those real concerns. They would not dare; they would be crucified by their peers.

There has been some violence against reporters. In March, people who work for a local California news agency said they were assaulted at a Trump rally by his supporters, according to the Los Angeles Times. But the report said that among the four people arrested at the incident, all were counter-protesters, and made no mention of them being inspired by Trump.

..

After the riot in Charlottesville, nearly two weeks ago, some reporters on the scene said on social media that they had been attacked by people counter protesting the white supremacy rally.

Among those in the media who said they had been assaulted were Taylor Lorenz of The Hill, who posted a video on Facebook that cuts off after she is heard screaming and a man's voice yells at her to "Stop fucking recording." She claimed she had been punched in the face and that her phone was kicked away.

The photographer for a CBS affiliate in Richmond was also allegedly attacked by the Left and had to get stitches while recording one of the counter protests, according to the station.

It's always the same with the Left: blame the Republicans for things that your side does regularly. 

The fact is that the violence is mainly on the Left.  

The kind of people that go to Trump rallies, ordinary people, would no more think of attacking a reporter than killing their children.  They may despise reporters for their bias and open bigotry.  They know that the press hates normal people and sees Trump supporters are racist Nazis.  They accept that and go on.  They just ignore reporters.  But the Left has to have the press working for them.  It's the way they appear to be the majority when they are a minority.  The press is their megaphone, their crazy fun-house mirror to appear to be ten feet tall.  And if by mistake a reporters actually records their violence and shows the reality, they attack the reporter.

On Intimidation and Character Assassination

Intimidation is a common feature of Leftist politics, such that most regular folks routinely hide the extent of their true political beliefs.

Leftists have taken it upon themselves to insinuate that this is racism, or some other -ism, and that we are all secret fascists who merely don’t want our horrible views exposed to daylight. But they have it exactly backwards, probably by design. You see, actual neo-Nazis and modern fascists are anything but secretive about their beliefs. Though they are very few, they are also very loud. They want to be seen. They have already paid the social price for it. Calling a Nazi a Nazi doesn’t hurt their feelings any. They know what they are.

In this, SJWs and their ilk are projecting their own behavior onto their ideological opponents. Many SJWs are thinly-veiled Communists, so they presume that we must all be thinly-veiled Nazis. After all, it’s the sort of thing they would do in our place.

In reality, most people on the Right are just scared. Not of physical violence for the most part, though perhaps some worry about that too. Rather, they fear character assassination. They fear being tarred as racist, sexist, or some other thing, and losing their friends, their jobs, and their good names.

It all comes down to the media. Without the power of the media to amplify such nonsensical accusations, nobody would fear the Left. We would laugh at such insults. The stupidity of calling everybody a secret fascist would be readily apparent. But with the media able to pick any random target it wishes, and assassinate that person’s character at will, with little to no possibility of defense… the fear is there.

Incidents like what happened to Justine Sacco reinforce this. Remember Brendan Eich “resigning” (we all know the he was pressured to do so). Remember the media trotting out to the middle of nowhere to find a pizza shop that didn’t want to cater gay weddings. The implication is that anyone could be a target. Being a small business owner in the middle of nowhere doesn’t make you safe.

Nobody is safe from the media. That’s what they want you to believe, but in such a way that no one clearly states it, that nobody clearly admits it, so that they always retain plausible deniability.

Note that since Trump unexpectedly won the election, the media has been dedicating itself 24/7 to doing nothing but assassinating his character. They even tacitly excuse literal assassination, in the case of Steve Scalise.

You don't hear much about Steve Scalise in the media. In fact outside of Fox News, Steve Scalese has disappeared. Because the media can't admit that it encouraged one of their followers to assassinate Republicans.

The FBI’s Briefing On The GOP Baseball Shooting Couldn’t Have Been More Bizarre

The FBI tried to claim that the shooting at the baseball field was spontaneous and had no target, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Mollie Hemingway

The FBI gave an utterly bizarre update on its investigation into an attempt to assassinate Republican members of Congress. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) remains in the hospital from the attempt on his life in which two police officers and a congressional staffer were also shot. The hospital upgraded his condition to “fair” and said he faces a long recovery.

Americans may know, thanks to public social media profiles, that attempted murderer James Hodgkinson was an active Democratic activist and Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer who hated Republican members of Congress. He held membership in multiple social media groups strongly opposed to Republicans, such as “The Road to Hell Is Paved With Republicans,” “Join the Resistance Worldwide,” “Donald Trump is not my President,” “Terminate the Republican Party,” “Boycott the Republican Party,” and “Expose Republican Fraud,” among dozens of other groups. He was a voracious consumer of liberal media and believed the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to secure the White House.

The FBI admits that Hodgkinson:

• vociferously raged against Republicans in online forums,
• had a piece of paper bearing the names of six members of Congress,
• was reported for doing target practice outside his home in recent months before moving to Alexandria,
• had mapped out a trip to the DC area,
• took multiple photos of the baseball field he would later shoot up, three days after the New York Times mentioned that Republicans practiced baseball at an Alexandria baseball field with little security,
• lived out of his van at the YMCA directly next door to the baseball field he shot up,
• legally purchased a rifle in March 2003 and 9 mm handgun “in November 2016,”
• modified the rifle at some point to accept a detachable magazine and replaced the original stock with a folding stock,
• rented a storage facility to hide hundreds of rounds of ammunition and additional rifle components,
• asked “Is this the Republican or Democrat baseball team?” before firing on the Republicans,
• ran a Google search for information on the “2017 Republican Convention” hours before the shooting,
• and took photos at high-profile Washington locations, including the east front plaza of the U.S. Capitol and the Dirksen Senate Office.

We know from other reporting that the list was of six Republican Freedom Caucus members, including Rep. Mo Brooks, who was present at the practice.

So what does the FBI decide this information means? Well, the takeaway of the briefing was characterized well by the Associated Press headline about it: “FBI: Gunman who shot congressman had no target in mind.” The Associated Press reported the FBI:

• believes the gunman “had no concrete plan to inflict violence” against Republicans,
• “had not yet clarified who, if anyone, he planned to target, or why,”
• believes he may have just “happened upon” the baseball game the morning of June 14, and that the attack appeared “spontaneous,”
• are unclear on the “context” of Hodgkinson’s note with six names of members of Congress,
• does not believe that photographs of the baseball field or other sites “represented surveillance of intended targets,” and
• “painted a picture of a down-on-his-luck man with few future prospects.”

In fact, USA Today went with “FBI offers portrait of troubled Alexandria shooter with ‘anger management problem’” for their headline, since that’s what the FBI emphasized in the briefing.

The FBI also said there was no “nexus to terrorism” in the attempted mass assassination of Republican leadership by a Democratic activist. The claim that tourists take pictures of a a completely unremarkable baseball field in a tiny neighborhood also seems odd, particularly when the pictures were taken a few days after The New York Times reported that Republican members of Congress practice baseball there with little security. Someone going by the moniker “Yoenis Cespedes” wrote, “As a guy who could arguably be called a reconnaissance manager when he was in the Army, this is reconnaissance.”

Oh, and here’s a little tidbit that didn’t interest many people in the media beyond a brief mention in the last paragraphs:

Hodgkinson also visited the office of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose campaign he had worked on as a volunteer, and was in email contact with the two Democratic senators from his home state.

As one Twitter wag put it, “You’d think “Congressional Shooter Visited Actual Capitol Hill Offices” would be kinda a big deal and you’d be wrong.”

I wrote last week that the media’s big problem right now is that everyone in the country knows how they’d be covering the shooting if the parties were reversed. Can you imagine if a shooter had visited the office of Sen. Ted Cruz and corresponded with two Republican senators? Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) gave emails to investigators last week but it was treated mostly as local news.

With trust in institutions at historic lows, and the bureaucracy beset by fears of politicization, the FBI made a poor decision to gaslight Americans by claiming that the assassination attempt wasn’t premeditated terrorism but a spontaneous “anger management” problem.

The FBI’s briefing appears so contrary to the facts as to be insulting. When a man with a history of hating Republicans cases a location, takes pictures, verifies the targets are Republicans before opening fire, has a list of Republican politicians in his pocket, and shoots and nearly kills Republicans, it’s hard to swallow the FBI’s contention that the shooting was “spontaneous” with “no target.” The agency should reconsider whether it wants to troll Americans about something this serious.

Ace of Spades comments:

Hyperpoliticized, Captured-By-Progressives Garbage Institution the FBI Claims James Hodgkinson Had No Particular Target In Mind, Didn't "Surveil" the Minor, Ugly Park When He Repeatedly Scouted It and Took Pictures of It

—Ace

I don't think I'll ever trust the FBI again, and would be very skeptical of any case they made, were I sitting on a federal jury.

About that Seth Rich murder (DRUDGE)

Independent group releases report on Seth Rich murder investigation...

'Death does not appear to be random homicide'...

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Roger Simon: Baseball Shooter a Big Wake-Up Call for the Left.

This man came from the extreme end of Trump Derangement Syndrome, but he didn’t emerge entirely by himself. He came from a petri dish that we are all submerged in, nurturing hate as never before in most of our lifetimes.

We need look no further than yesterday’s grilling of Jeff Sessions by the Senate Intelligence Committee. This investigation is putatively about Russian interference in our election, but we learned nothing about that. Not a thing. In fact, it was barely mentioned. The entire event was used as a means to “get Trump” and/or his associates. Senators like Heinrich ooze hate, obviously playing to a likeminded crowd. It is indeed a “witch hunt” and any reader ofThe Crucible knows where that leads.

Meanwhile, just this past weekend, here in Los Angeles, we had our annual gay pride celebration. But it didn’t seem to be about pride at all, only about unremitting attacks on our president (and by implication anyone Republican), as if everyone in the streets would have been delighted to see a replay of Kathy Griffin’s nauseating decapitation or the denouement of the current Shakespeare in the Park production where a Trump/Caesar is beheaded nightly. (Ironically, Trump was on record for gay marriage long before Clinton or Obama, but facts mean nothing to the pussy-hatted.)

And then there were the wild accusations of anti-Semitism when nearly half of Trump’s family is Jewish and — as it turned out — of the few such incidents that have occurred since his inauguration none were committed by his supporters. In fact, they all came from the left. This was, of course, barely reported. It didn’t fit the narrative of hate.

And this is to omit the most horrifying examples of all — the absolutely despicable behavior toward conservatives on our campuses. It’s like the return of the Brown Shirts.

Sense a pattern?

With all due respect to Roger Simon, but I'm not convinced that the Left is not all for this.

Scott Adams "This guy was radicalized by the Left."

Watch Scott Adams.

Ann Coulter: THE ‘RESISTANCE' GOES LIVE-FIRE

The explosion of violence against conservatives across the country is being intentionally ginned up by Democrats, reporters, TV hosts, late-night comedians and celebrities, who compete with one another to come up with the most vile epithets for Trump and his supporters.

They go right up to the line, trying not to cross it, by, for example, vamping with a realistic photo of a decapitated Trump or calling the president a "piece of s---" while hosting a show on CNN.

The media are orchestrating a bloodless coup, but they're perfectly content to have their low-IQ shock troops pursue a bloody coup.

This week, one of the left's foot soldiers gunned down Republican members of Congress and their staff while they were playing baseball in Virginia. Democratic Socialist James Hodgkinson was prevented from committing a mass murder only by the happenstance of a member of the Republican leadership being there, along with his 24-hour Capitol Police protection.

Before the election the media declared themselves horrified that anyone who question the legitimacy of the election. Once they lost, they lost it.

It began with Trump's inauguration, when a leftist group plotted to pump a debilitating gas into one Trump inaugural ball, military families were assaulted upon leaving the Veterans' Inaugural Ball, and attendees of other balls had water thrown on them.

Since then, masked, armed liberals around the country have formed military-style organizations to beat up conservatives. In liberal towns, the police are regularly ordered to stand down to allow the assaults to proceed unimpeded.

The media only declared a crisis when conservatives fought back, smashing the black-clad beta males. ("Battle for Berkeley!")

There is more media coverage for conservatives' "microaggressions" toward powerful minorities -– such as using the wrong pronoun -- than there is for liberals' physical attacks on conservatives, including macings, concussions and hospitalizations.

And now some nut Bernie Sanders-supporter confirms that it's Republicans standing on a baseball field, before opening fire.

Wait for it: "we need to beware of "backlash" against leftist Democrats"

Never mind that one of Bernie Sanders most ardent supporters and Rachel Maddow superfan tried to assassinate a bunch of Republican congressmen.  What we have to be concerned about is a backlash against Democrats who want to behead, stab or defenestrate Donald Trump.

Bet on it in tomorrow's Virginian Pilot.  

All in all  Hodgkinson's comments on Facebooks and in his published letters was rather typical of the people whose letters are published daily in the Virginian Pilot and echo the editorial position of the paper's editors.  This is the problem.  The man who tried to assassinate Republicans was not a deranged nut; he was firmly in the mainstream of the Democrat party.   

Mark Steyn:

Such traditions [the congressional baseball game] are difficult to sustain in a culture where pop stars are making videos pulling guns on the President, and comedians are swinging around severed presidential heads, and theatregoers are willing to pay Broadway prices to see Julius Trump stabbed to death on the Ides of March. In this new ball game there are college professors calling for Republicans to be "lined up and shot" - and helpfully clarifying "That's not hyperbole." Upon arrival, one notes, the shooter asked a spectator whether it was the GOP or the Democrats on the field. On receiving the answer he wanted, he advanced upon his target.