CNN Panel of so-called "journalists" demands that government censors speech

"There's a bigger problem here about how we're going to control the channels of communications in this country."

Quiet part out loud https://t.co/HgaLUXobCF

— Fusilli Spock (@awstar11) May 1, 2022

David Mamet: American Occupation

 

lived for very many years in rural Vermont. I’d bought a long-abandoned, post-and-beam farmhouse on a third-class dirt road. The realtor was a German immigrant who’d come to Vermont with his wife and infant children just after the war. He suggested that I call a local builder, Bob, to inspect the house, which was superficially in dreadful shape, but the farm and basement were sound. Bob said he’d be glad to put it right, and he and his brother-in-law restored it to its 1805 perfection.

Bob’s family had lived through the war in Germany, and through the famine afterward, and through relocation in America, ignorant of the language. Bob taught himself carpentry and all the building trades, and became a much-respected member of the small town, where all of his contemporary men had fought against the Axis in World War II. His brother-in-law, Eric, had been in the Hitler Youth, and Bob was a glider commando in the Luftwaffe—the equivalent, today, of Delta Force, or the Navy Seals.

My family became friends with Bob, and his wife, Ilse, became a surrogate grandmother—or better, great-aunt—to my kids. His family was my first encounter with the German national character—hard working, honest, and uncomplaining.

This woman is teaching people to hate people with different skin colors.

 

Tal Bachman: We Have Met the Enemy

 Whether they realize it or not, Wokists themselves combine the lunatic loyalty of the Manson family with the hollow pseudo-joy of Jonestown residents, the racism of National Socialists, the inhumanity of Mao Tse-Tung, the bratty tantrums of Veruca Salt, the nihilism of Bakunin-style anarchists, the totalitarianism of Stalin's Soviet Union, the child torture and sacrifice of the Mayans, the derangement of Heaven's Gate followers, the sadistic violence of the Jacobins, and the ruthless control-freakism of the current Chinese Communist Party.

Now add to that noxious syncretic blend the Wokist use of powerful communication technologies to shape narratives and meta-narratives, destroy opponents, and recruit new converts, and you've got yourself a thing.

Read the whole thing and realize that it's a war. 

Oh, realize that we are partly responsible:

We also voted for idiots. We voted for idiot mayors, idiot governors, idiot senators, idiot representatives, idiot party leaders, idiot presidential candidates, idiot everything. We allowed mega-donor fatcat globalists to take over the Republican Party. We sat by as they neutralized the Tea Party, and then resumed pushing for endless corporate tax breaks, endless job exportation, and endless scab labor via illegal immigration.

The Miseducation of America’s Elites

 

This is the reason that we have the worst ruling class in history.

By normal American standards, they are quite wealthy. By the standards of Harvard-Westlake, they are average. These are two-career couples who credit their own success not to family connections or inherited wealth but to their own education. So it strikes them as something more than ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year—a school with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of Lachlan and Rupert’s daughter-in-law, on its board—is teaching students that capitalism is evil.

For most parents, the demonization of capitalism is the least of it. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution”—unveiled this July, in a 20-page document—is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque.

“I grew up in L.A., and the Harvard School definitely struggled with diversity issues. The stories some have expressed since the summer seem totally legitimate,” says one of the fathers. He says he doesn’t have a problem with the school making greater efforts to redress past wrongs, including by bringing more minority voices into the curriculum. What he has a problem with is a movement that tells his children that America is a bad country and that they bear collective racial guilt.

“They are making my son feel like a racist because of the pigmentation of his skin,” one mother says. Another poses a question to the group: “How does focusing a spotlight on race fix how kids talk to one another? Why can’t they just all be One private school parent, born in a Communist nation, tells me: “I came to this country escaping the very same fear of retaliation that now my own child feels.” Another joked: “We need to feed our families. Oh, and pay $50,000 a year to have our children get indoctrinated.” A teacher in New York City put it most concisely: “To speak against this is to put all of your moral capital at risk.”

Parents who have spoken out against this ideology, even in private ways, say it hasn’t gone over well. “I had a conversation with a friend, and I asked him: ‘Is there anything about this movement we should question?’” said a father with children in two prep schools in Manhattan. “And he said: ‘Dude, that’s dangerous ground you’re on in our friendship.’ I’ve had enough of those conversations to know what happens.”

That fear is shared, deeply, by the children. For them, it’s not just the fear of getting a bad grade or getting turned down for a college recommendation, though that fear is potent. It’s the fear of social shaming. “If you publish my name, it would ruin my life. People would attack me for even questioning this ideology. I don’t even want people knowing I’m a capitalist,” a student at the Fieldston School in New York City told me, in a comment echoed by other students I spoke with. (Fieldston declined to comment for this article.) “The kids are scared of other kids,” says one Harvard-Westlake mother.

The atmosphere is making their children anxious, paranoid, and insecure—and closed off from even their close friends. “My son knew I was talking to you and he begged me not to,” another Harvard-Westlake mother told me. “He wants to go to a great university, and he told me that one bad statement from me will ruin us. This is the United States of America. Are you freaking kidding me?”Wolverines?” (Harvard-Westlake has declined to comment.)...

British TV newsman loses it during story on diversity & Little House on the Prairie, hilarious. “You pampered, privately-educated cunts.”

Everything Is Broken

... beginning in the 1970s, the economic ground underneath this landscape began to come apart. Michael Lind explains this better than anyone else:

The strategy of American business, encouraged by neoliberal Democrats and libertarian conservative Republicans alike, has been to lower labor costs in the United States, not by substituting labor-saving technology for workers, but by schemes of labor arbitrage: Offshoring jobs when possible to poorly paid workers in other countries and substituting unskilled immigrants willing to work for low wages in some sectors, like meatpacking and construction and farm labor. American business has also driven down wages by smashing unions in the private sector, which now have fewer members—a little more than 6% of the private sector workforce—than they did under Herbert Hoover.

This was the tinder. The tech revolution was the match—one-upping the ’70s economy by demanding more efficiency and more speed and more boundarylessness, and demanding it everywhere. They introduced not only a host of inhuman wage-suppressing tactics, like replacing full-time employees with benefits with gig workers with lower wages and no benefits, but also a whole new aesthetic that has come to dominate every aspect of our lives—a set of principles that collectively might be thought of as flatness.

Flatness is the reason the three jobs with the most projected growth in your country all earn less than $27,000 a year, and it is also the reason that all the secondary institutions that once gave structure and meaning to hundreds of millions of American lives—jobs and unions but also local newspapers, churches, Rotary Clubs, main streets—have been decimated. And flatness is the mechanism by which, over the past decade and with increasing velocity over the last three years, a single ideologically driven cohort captured the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life. It is how the Long March went from a punchline to reality, as one institution after another fell and then entire sectors, like journalism, succumbed to control by narrow bands of sneering elitists who arrogated to themselves the license to judge and control the lives of their perceived inferiors....

Opinion: I Now Better Understand the ‘Good German’

 

Dennis Prager:

As my listeners and readers can hopefully attest, I have been on a lifelong quest to understand human nature and human behavior. I am sad to report that I have learned more in the past few years, particularly in 2020, than in any equivalent period of time.

One of the biggest revelations concerns a question that has always plagued me: How does one explain the “good German,” the term used to describe the average, presumably decent German, who did nothing to hurt Jews but also did nothing to help them and did nothing to undermine the Nazi regime? The same question could be asked about the average Frenchman during the Vichy era, the average Russian under Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, and their successors, and the millions of others who did nothing to help their fellow citizens under oppressive dictatorships.

These past few years have taught me not to so quickly judge the quiet German, Russian, etc. Of course, I still judge Germans who helped the Nazis and Germans who in any way hurt Jews. But the Germans who did nothing? Not so fast.

What has changed my thinking has been watching what is happening in America (and Canada and Australia and elsewhere, for that matter).

The ease with which tens of millions of Americans have accepted irrational, unconstitutional, and unprecedented police state-type restrictions on their freedoms, including even the freedom to make a living, has been, to understate the case, sobering.

The same holds true for the acceptance by most Americans of the rampant censorship on Twitter and all other major social media platforms. Even physicians and other scientists are deprived of freedom of speech if, for example, they offer scientific support for hydroxychloroquine along with zinc to treat COVID-19 in the early stages. Board-certified physician Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, who has saved hundreds of COVID-19 patients from suffering and/or death, has been banned from Twitter for publicizing his lifesaving hydroxychloroquine and zinc protocol.

Half of America, the nonleft half, is afraid to speak their minds at virtually every university, movie studio, and large corporation—indeed, at virtually every place of work.

There is a sinister similarity between the Cult of Mao and Woke Culture

 The ongoing cultural revolution in much of the West has not yet achieved the absurdity of the Mao religion of 1967–69. Yet so-called “Wokeness” has the characteristics of a religion bent on the extirpation of heretics, as Joseph Bottum, Jamil Jivani, and Michael Vlahos, have observed. No wonder that some of the new religion’s adherents vandalized, desecrated, and burned churches and synagogues.

In America in 2020 as in China in 1966, ultra-left rage mobs have been allowed to riot, assault, loot, and pillage, as David Bernstein describes in “The Right to Armed Self-Defense in the Light of Law Enforcement Abdication.” The modern violent ultra-left is mostly above the law, including pandemic laws against mass gatherings.

As in China, the mobs do not target only the heretics. Anyone can be attacked for no reason at all—the better to terrorize the population into submission. Thus, mobs purporting to care about racial justice demolish apolitical small businesses owned by blacks; business that try to mollify the rioters by putting up signs of political support receive no mercy.

It’s easy to lose one’s livelihood over nothing, like the Hispanic truck driver fired for cracking his knuckles, which a Twitter mob interpreted as a white power symbol. Or for indirectly casting doubt on the mobs; an employee of a data company was fired for retweeting a study showing that peaceful protests are more effective than riots in achieving political objectives. (Both incidents are detailed in Yascha Mounk’s “Stop Firing the Innocent” essay for The Atlantic.) People who dare to criticize Black Lives Matter Global Foundation, Inc.—or who fail to praise it sufficiently—may quickly find themselves unemployed and unemployable.

School curricula and libraries are being “decolonized” by the elimination of classic books such as Mildred Taylor’s “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,” a black woman’s history of her family in Jim Crow Mississippi.

Today’s cultural revolution, like Mao’s, is top-down and led by the most privileged university graduates and students. They have worked themselves into self-righteous fury against the unawokened lower classes.

As in 1966, modern iconoclasts deface and destroy all statues with equal zeal: abolitionists, animals, 9/11 firefighters, Indians, Union soldiers in the Civil War, Ulysses Grant, and Abraham Lincoln all get the same treatment as Confederates. Although the destroyers may not have heard of Lin Biao’s exhortation to “Smash the Four Olds,” they implicitly understand that building the “anti-capitalist” new order they want requires the obliteration of the memory of all that come before: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits.

An important difference between China in 1966 and the West today is that the rage mobs and their more sedentary allies do not yet control all means of communication—but the space for dissent is considerably narrower than it was just a little while ago. Unlike China, we don’t have a formal Socialist Education Campaign in every classroom—but we have something similar in more and more educational institutions, from pre-schools through university.

And at least in the United States, many do have the practical means to resist mob violence; professor Bernstein’s article collects numerous examples. But the exercise of lawful self-defense may still lead to criminal charges by prosecutors aligned with the extreme left.

China’s Cultural Revolution began to end in 1976 when Mao died, and the pragmatic totalitarians staged a coup that removed the more idealistic totalitarians. Will the people of the Anglosphere have to wait that long, or longer, for rescue? Or will the hundreds of millions of people who don’t support the totalitarian ultra-left emancipate themselves from mental slavery? Will they end the reign of terror of today’s Maoists?

Woke Capital Isn’t a Game

Conservatives need to stop treating virtue signaling as if it didn’t matter....

This summer corporate American cheered on BLM and Antifa as they burned our cities. Now, Twitter and Facebook openly censor information, while Nasdaq asks the government to sanction their stringent new diversity mandates. These news items hammer out a familiar beat, offering a clear glimpse into our future. It is long past time to get smart on what this phenomenon truly represents. 

 Older conservatives and leftists entertain two different, but related, misconceptions that make it difficult to see how the structure of these corporations drives woke culture. Many people like to believe that woke capitalism is insincere posturing. H.R. blather protects the company from lawsuits, woke ads build goodwill with progressives, and companies will use minority lending programs to create CDO products. Big deal—underneath it all, business remains the cold world of profit-seeking rationalism. Advertising is manipulative by its nature, therefore the most conspicuous examples lead people to believe that corporate America’s leftist positions are insincere. Purportedly, business only cares about the bottom line, and corporate America’s new persona is cynically dependent on how it impacts profit. 

I’m sorry, but a woman cannot just click her fingers and become a ‘he’.

 FROM SPIKED:

We need to talk about Ellen Page

So that’s it, is it? Ellen Page is no more? She’s been disappeared? She’s been shoved down the memory hole, left to stalk that netherworld of people whose names must never be uttered out loud, like Bruce Jenner, Frank Maloney, Voldemort? Ellen Page, the actress most famous for starring in irritant quirkhouse movie Juno, has now declared that she is Elliot Page and that she’s a he. And, boom, just like that, Ellen’s gone. She’s being erased from film history. People are getting into trouble even for saying the word ‘Ellen’. ‘Who?’, woke identitarians ask, as if they’ve all gone mad.

We need to talk about this. Specifically we need to talk about Ellen Page. We need to talk about the fact that this woman – yes, woman – existed in public life and in the celluloid imagination for many years, and that can’t just be scrubbed from the record, Soviet-style. Yesterday, Ellen issued a statement saying she is now Elliot and her pronouns are he and they. That’s just bad grammar. Swiftly, slavishly even, the establishment media and the film world rushed to erase Ellen, the movie star of a decade’s standing. It’s like she never existed. From IMDb to Wikipedia, it’s all Elliot. ‘Elliot Page is a Canadian actor’, Wikipedia tells us. Where’s Ellen gone?

I’m sorry, but a woman cannot just click her fingers and become a ‘he’...

Mark Steyn: "The Reset Jet Set"

 One of the themes of our summer audio entertainment The Prisoner of Windsor is that most of the chaps who matter in this world are people you've never heard of - by which I mean they are other than the omnipresent pygmies of the political scene: In a settled democratic society such as Canada, for example, if you wind up with an electoral contest between a woke mammy singer with a banana in his pants and a hollow husk less lifelike than his CBC election-night hologram whose only core belief is that he has no core beliefs other than that party donations should pay for his kids' schooling, you can take it as read that the real action must be elsewhere.

A lot of those chaps you've never heard of turn up in this video from the "World Economic Forum" - ie, the Davos set. After five months of Covid lockdown, you'll be happy to hear that all the experts have decided that 2021 will be the year of "The Great Reset":

I see my chums at the Heartland Institute headline this the "World Leaders' 'Great Reset' Plan". But, if by "leader" you mean an elected head of government accountable to the people, there is a total dearth. Indeed, it's a melancholy reflection on the state of "world leadership" that the nearest to anyone accountable to the people in this video is HRH The Prince of Wales, in whom one day in the hopefully extremely far distant future the executive authority of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, etc will be nominally vested but which cannot be exercised without the consent of the people's representatives. Yet even that token accountability is, as noted, in the future. So right now he's just another guy who's a "world leader" because he gets invited to Davos and you don't - and, even if you were minded to show up anyway, you'd need a private jet because all the scheduled flights have been Covid-canceled and the world's airports are ghost towns.

The First Stone Throwers

 

The tech monopolies like Twitter make their money and increase their power by making people hate and attack each other.  That's their business model.  It's not a bug, it's a fundamental feature. 

Jack Dorsey who owns Twitter needs and wants you to hate each other.  It's not a game to him, it's the way he makes his money.  And that's the reason why appeals to "fairness" are so totally beside the point.  If things were fair and conversation polite, Twitter would fail as a business.

All it takes is for certain people with a low threshold for violence to start the process of creating a violent mob.  And there are always people who are willing to throw the first stone, and then the rest of the mob is empowered to throw the next,and the next and the next.

Because people are mimetic, meaning they imitate both the behaviors and desires they observe in others, they can be prompted most easily to perform an action by others doing so. As a result, Girard says, “the first stone is the most difficult to throw ... Because it is the only one without a model.” Contagious violence can be forestalled if the crowd lacks a model to follow. 

"Threshold models” developed by sociologists complement Girard’s “first stone” theory. For instance, Mark Granovetter concludes that for a riot to occur, there must be one or more individuals in a crowd with low “thresholds” for engaging in risky or antisocial behavior. Once they start the process, individuals with higher thresholds, who are less predisposed to such acts, will be more likely to join in. The mimetic chain goes from the lowest-threshold actors, who are least in need of a model, to the highest-threshold ones who will only join the riot once many others are already participating. Just a few individuals with low thresholds suffice.

Like their archaic counterparts, these modern priests grasp that “collective effervescence” is a powerful force that needs to be channeled and circumscribed. But the essential goal of today’s priests is not control, although that is an effect. Nor is it social cohesion and the greater good of the community. It is profit. The gamified mechanisms that precipitate us toward indignation against enemies also drive our continued use of the platforms. The more of us that are transfixed by spectacles of victimization, the greater the revenue the platform brings in. Like a bloodthirsty god, the platform business feeds off of sacrifice.

 

 Stifled debate may present an immediate political loss, but the far greater risk is the subjugation of all realms of human life to the sacrificial profit-driven logic dictated by the digital platform god and its priests. Many of those who defend participating in these cruel rites seem to regard them as a vehicle of progress. But sacrifice is cyclical, never progressive. It permits a temporary substitutive crisis resolution, in which individual victims stand in symbolically for vast, multifaceted problems. The punishment and expulsion of the victim occasions a cathartic transference of responsibility and an ephemeral relief of pressure. But the platform god and its priests will keep stoking the resentments that precipitated us toward this harsh resolution. That’s the game they need us to play.

HOW BAD ARE AMERICA’S COLLEGES? THIS BAD

If you spend $70,000 a year sending your children to Macalaster College you are committing child abuse.

Some conservatives tend to say, “Sure the colleges and universities are bad, but…” There is no but. With rare exceptions, they are worse than you can imagine. Unless they are studying to be an engineer or a doctor, most people would be better off to avoid college altogether, learn a trade, and read books on their own. Which is the way it used to be.

For a window into the zoo that is “higher” education in the 21st century, check out this article by Kathy Kersten on Minnesota’s Macalester College in the upcoming issue of Thinking Minnesota. Kathy is a Senior Policy Fellow at Center of the American Experiment, and is by far Minnesota’s best columnist and investigative reporter.

Click on the link to the entire article.

Here’s One Thing Officials Can Do to Make Lockdown Life Better: Stop Being Hypocritical Tyrants

This is beginning to look more and more like you local government officials.

We're in the middle of some serious shit and petty tyrants at the local level are only making it worse.  And you can spot a trend: the officials in charge are mostly Democrats.

There are the police officers who thought it was a good idea to pester a little girl shooting baskets alone in a park. She was socially distanced. She was fine. If a game of street 3-on-3 suddenly broke out, well, that’s a different story. But she was alone. So leave her alone. The police later apologized, but they should have just used some common sense and avoided the whole situation. And there are the police officers in Colorado who arrested a dad playing ball with his daughter in a park. Leave people alone or this could start getting ugly. Most Americans support the police, but we don’t support a police state.

There are the officials who decided Easter weekend was a good opportunity to start messing with churches struggling like everyone else to deal with the new reality. California’s Mendocino County is banning church singing on a livestream. How does this help stop the spread of coronavirus? Kentucky’s Democrat governor took to taking down Christians’ license plates for going to church in their cars. How does this help halt the virus from spreading? It doesn’t. It just makes people who are already on edge that much edgier. Elections matter. Remember this in a few years and do better.

Michigan should also do better. It elected the cluelessly tyrannical Gretchen Whitmer as its governor. A few weeks ago Whitmer was a rising Democrat star. Now, she’s a petty thug who’s in over her head (which doesn’t rule her out of still being a rising Democrat star). She’s awful. She has gone on a power trip worthy of Blofeld, the nutty Bond villain who built a fortress in a volcano and fed his underlings to piranhas. Whitmer is telling people who own more than one home that they cannot drive between those homes. How does this stop the spread of the virus? She’s telling people they can’t buy carpet and paint because they’re not “essential.” Tell that to anyone who suddenly has to repair something in the home they’re suddenly hanging onto because they suddenly lost their job because Whitmer arbitrarily closed their business. Tell that to the guy whose whole job is home repair and remodeling. Who is she or any of these so-called leaders to say what is and isn’t “essential”? Broadly speaking, a legal job that enables someone to feed their family is essential to that family. Tell them they’re not essential and they’ll tell you exactly what they think of you. There will be choice words and gestures.
...
When we see Chicago’s mayor ban haircuts, and then get one herself because she’s privileged and you're not and she imposes a curfew on others for no evident reason, and when we see a Texas county judge apparently violate his own stay at home order, it sends the entirely wrong signal in a republic where the people are supposed to be the government.

It also hints at something a whole lot darker that our dear leaders had better not let fester. And the best thing they can do to prevent that is to stop acting like petty little tyrants.

Stripping them naked and whipping them through the streets are a good start. 

Julie Kelly on Twitter

The Dems and media and NeverTrump LIED for more than two years that Trump had colluded with the Kremlin to steal the election. Innocent people were investigated by their own government and harassed by the media and mocked by the public. To date no one has been held accountable

— Julie Kelly (@julie_kelly2) July 18, 2019

Mark Steyn on "Wokeness at Warp Speed"

A few months ago I observed to Tucker Carlson that the difference between "Bush Derangement Syndrome" and "Trump Derangement Syndrome" was that the former was largely contained to a visceral loathing for the President himself, whereas the latter has been extended to anyone who voted for him - ie, the half of the electorate comprised of "racists", "fascists" and "white supremacists". Now TDS rampages on, to consume half the Democrats, too...

Like Nancy Pelosi and Slow Joe Biden

Let us take it as read that Trump is racist, and every Republican legislator is racist, and every Republican voter is racist. That's still not enough. Insufficiently Woke Democrats have to be racist, too:

Ocasio-Cortez Implies Pelosi Is Racist for Singling Out 'Newly Elected Women Of Color'

Speaker Pelosi has hosted meetings of "dreamers" where she thanked their parents for bringing them to the United States, because they're better than us, they're better than you. But you can cheer mass invasion and demographic replacement and still come up short, you racist. So it turns out even the vice-president to the first black president is likewise a racist:

Joe Biden's Racial Dog Whistle...

In the 2012 election, a cocksure Biden assured a black audience that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were "gonna put y'all back in chains". That's how easy it was back then. He dozes off for twenty minutes and wakes up to find he's Simon Legree.

Today the Virginian Pilot published an editorial cartoon calling America racist and referred to Donald Trump's tweets where he tells some of Democrats who continually criticize America that they may want to first fix the cultures they left.  They were labeled "incendiary."

So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly......

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2019

....and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2019

So I did a search of the Virginian Pilot archives finding dozens of references to Trump as a Nazi, a fascist, Hitler or as a racist.  The Virginian Pilot never once called those vile slurs "incendiary."   Is it any wonder that unhinged, violent radicals like Willem Van Spronsen are encouraged to shoot up an ICE facility in Tacoma, Washington?  The press encourages him and people like him.  They hold his coat and have his back.

But I digress.  Back to Steyn:

As I said a couple of years back, when everybody's Hitler nobody's Hitler. And, indeed, when nobody's Hitler everybody's Hitler. Conservatives such as yours truly are inured to what passes for "debate" in America: if I critique AOC's Green New Deal and its plans to eliminate bovine flatulence, it's because I'm racist. It's not a difference over public policy, it's simply my bigotry. This strategy of labeling rather than debating has proved so effective that Republicans have given up talking about almost anything that matters - see, e.g., immigration until Trump entered the primaries four years ago. But, precisely because labeling has proved so effective for so long, it would be preposterous to expect the labelers to confine its use only to Republicans. Especially when labeling is all they know how to do.

And so the Wokestapo (as Laura Rosen Cohen calls them) knock on the door, and Nancy Pelosi finds herself as reviled as old-time segregationists like, er, Mitt Romney. From USA Today:

No, the real issue here is what we academics call 'intersectionality' — the combined impact of racism, sexism and other types of discrimination on people and groups. In practice, it means that white women in power often take on the same characteristics of white men in power toward women of color.

So the Speaker of the House, quite without meaning to, has turned into Nancy Trumposi.

It was inevitable.  It's not possible to be Woke enough.

"These are people who consider themselves leftists but probably don’t like anything about socialism except the gulags."

Meet the Socialist who - at least - have an idea of what the country's about.  But then they're socialist so they're screwed up too.

Khachiyan says ‘a lot of these people are tyrannical narcissists’. ‘They are noncommittal, incapable of tolerating conflict or taking consequences. So they would rather have a system like polyamory where you kick that can down the road.’ Frost adds that many millennials ‘think they can eliminate jealousy… But sometimes you’re going to have bad sex, sometimes you’re going to be jealous. It’s not the end of the world.’

We move from jealousy to hate, and to the alleged epidemic of racism or even fascism often talked up by the left. Hate speech, we’re told, must be contained. Khachiyan takes a refreshingly liberal line: ‘You should be able to hate and hatred should be protected, as long as it doesn’t spill over into physical violence.’ ‘There’s this idea that we live in a white supremacist country when we fundamentally don’t’, says Khachiyan. She mentions antifa, the self-styled anti-fascist group that, since our conversation, has hit the headlines for beating up a right-leaning journalist in Portland. ‘Antifa have manufactured a threat to have some semblance of an identity’, she says. ‘All these people who say they are anti-fascist don’t know what it means to be persecuted.’

The Genius of Trump, the Madness of the Libs

An entire major political party has lost it's collective mind.

Readers may recall some years back when John posted an item that began “George W. Bush is a political genius,” and naturally readers with an irony-poor diet (there are vitamins for this!) took him literally. So when I suggest that Trump is a political genius, I run the same risk. Especially since you don’t really need to be a genius to exploit the growing madness of the American left. The scene prompts me to paraphrase an old Will Rogers joke: It’s no trouble at all getting re-elected in 2020 when you have the whole Democratic Party (and its media adjuncts) working for you!

But you do have to credit Trump with having an instinct for the small touch that will make liberals certifiably insane. Like having a few tanks shipped in for display in Washington on July 4. The left is certain—certain!—that this is a precursor to a declaration of martial law. Lawrence Tribe, once a respected Harvard Law professor before dementia took hold, tweeted:

Canadian writer/provocateur Gad Saad to offer up this brilliant bit of video satire:

Michael Eric Dyson to say on MSNBC that the Betsy Ross flag should be compared to a swastika:

Antifa are Fascists and they rule Portland

Mark Steyn writes in Portlantifa:

In Italia i fascisti si dividono in due categorie : i fascisti e gli antifascisti.

"In Italy the fascists are divided into two categories: the fascists and the anti-fascists." In America the division is a little more lop-sided: There is no organized fascist movement except for the so-called anti-fascist movement: Antifa wear uniforms and masks on the streets of American cities and perpetrate violence with the support and connivance of powerful Democrat politicians and their hideously politicized police departments.

The consent of the latter is especially important: in the Democrats' northern fiefdoms the cops increasingly behave as they did in the party's old southern fiefdoms - they're there not to keep the peace but to ensure that their buddies in the Klan - whoops, sorry, I mean Klantifa - get to give the designated "troublemakers" a bloody good hiding. Thus in Portland, Oregon the police stood by and let Antifa beat the crap out of reporter Andy Ngo, steal thousands of dollars' worth of his equipment, and put him in hospital with a brain hemorrhage. But that's just policing as usual in a corrupt municipality increasingly without the law. As Democrat Mayor and Police Commissioner Ted Wheeler put it last year, after his officers again sat back and watched as Antifa blocked streets and threatened and intimidated drivers:

I was appalled by what I saw in the video, but I support the Portland Police Bureau's decision not to intervene.

They're getting so good at "not intervening" it might be easier for the city simply to lay them off and contract out all "law enforcement" to Antifa.

Antifa is the Klan dressed in black and fascists like Ted Wheeler are the North's Bull Connor.