Mark Steyn: The Grand Convergence

What happened yesterday is a remarkable convergence of the spirits of the age: mass shootings, immigration, the Big Tech thought-police, the long reach of the Iranian Revolution, the refugee racket, animal rights, vegan music videos... It was the latest mismatched meeting between east and west in the age of the Great Migrations: Nasim Aghdam died two days before her 39th birthday, still living (according to news reports) with either her parents or her grandmother. She came to America at the age of seventeen, and spent two decades in what appears to be a sad and confused search to find something to give her life meaning. But in a cruder sense the horror in San Bruno was also a sudden meeting of two worlds hitherto assumed to be hermetically sealed from each other: the cool, dispassionate, dehumanized, algorithmic hum of High Tech - and the raw, primal, murderous rage breaking through from those on the receiving end.

and then there's thiis truth:

The San Bruno attack also underlines a point I've been making for over a decade, ever since my troubles with Canada's "human rights" commissions: "Hate speech" doesn't lead to violence so much as restraints on so-called "hate speech" do - because, when you tell someone you can't say that, there's nothing left for him to do but open fire or plant his bomb. Restricting speech - or even being perceived to be restricting speech - incentivizes violence as the only alternative. As you'll notice in YouTube comments, I'm often derided as a pansy fag loser by the likes of ShitlordWarrior473 for sitting around talking about immigration policy as opposed to getting out in the street and taking direct action. In a culture ever more inimical to freedom of expression, there'll be more of that: The less you're permitted to say, the more violence there will be.

White Suspect Arrested in Louisiana Killings of Black Men Police Say Likely ‘Racially Motivated’

Press jubilant.  The narrative vindicated.

Who could have predicted this?

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.

French Police Search for Clues of Motive of Man Who Attacked Orly Airport While Shouting That He Was Ready to "Die for Allah"

Via Ace of Spades

Police questioned and then released relatives of a man shot dead at a Paris airport, as investigators sought clues on why he attacked an army patrol in an incident that has pushed security to the forefront of France's election campaign.

Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said late on Saturday that the man, named as 39-year-old Ziyed Ben Belgacem, had shouted he was there to "die for Allah" when he tried to seize a gun from a woman air force member on patrol at Orly airport.

After throwing down a bag containing a can of petrol and putting an air pistol to the head of the soldier, he was shot three times by her colleagues.

...A federal judge in Hawaii issued an order that Trump immediately grant this Mystery Man US citizenship and also a pilot's license.

There is no fixing stupid.

Middlebury College: college presidents whose superpower is appeasement.

The Speech President Patton Gave To Students

If there were any uncertainty about that, President Patton soon put it to rest. At seven minutes into the video, she took the stage and spoke for six and a half minutes. Let’s put this in present tense. Patton speaks in a somber tone, and is at pains to get across her own extreme reluctance to have Charles Murray on campus. Her points are:

Inclusiveness. “Thank you all—every single one of you—for being here.” Several times over the course of the next six minutes, Patton repeats a pledge of allegiance to diversity: “Middlebury is committed to unlocking the potential and brilliance of every student no matter their race, their class, their sexual orientation, their religious orientation, their disabled status, or any other demographic marker.”

Regret. “I’m here because if my schedule is free I always respond to the student requests.” Patton allows that college policy permits students and faculty freedom “to examine and discuss all questions of interest to them.” She sounds not one bit enthusiastic about this policy.

Repugnance. “I would regret it terribly if my presence here today, which is an expression of support I give to all students who are genuinely seeking to engage in a very tough public sphere, is read to be something which it is not: an endorsement of Mr. Murray’s research and writings. I will state here that I profoundly disagree with many of Mr. Murray’s views.”

Is every Middlebury student a repository of brilliance waiting to be unlocked? Presumably the Charles Murray of “The Bell Curve” would have doubts about that, as would anyone who takes the trouble to watch the 44-minute video, which serves as a pretty good illustration of what not-very-intelligent people look like when they succumb to a mob mentality. Patton’s list of the “demographic markers” she is eager to defend does not include political orientation. Indeed, she began her remarks by declaring, “Allow me to state the obvious. We are a left-leaning campus…”

Patton Didn’t Defend Free Expression—She Took Sides

Nowhere in her remarks was there any defense of the ideal of free expression on campus. She acknowledged that “college policy” left the door open to the American Enterprise Institute Club to invite Charles Murray, but Patton had nothing to say about why it was a good idea to let Murray or others not on the left speak.

Nowhere in her remarks was there any defense of the ideal of free expression on campus.

Patton’s explicit and emphatic avowals of her disagreement with Murray were gratuitous. She cited none of his views and gave no reasons why she disagreed with those views. She merely took sides: siding with the protesters in their uninformed distaste for Murray, though not in their willingness to deny him a platform.

The underlying message to the students who showed up to protest was that President Patton felt the justice of their cause, but was determined to stick with college policy allowing controversial speakers to speak. Patton positioned herself almost identically to how Chancellor Nicholas Dirks at UC Berkeley had positioned himself prior to the Milo Yiannopoulos event. Dirks had likewise empathized his extreme dislike of the speaker’s views and his temperate allegiance to free speech.

But perhaps the most striking precedent for what happened at Middlebury is the May 2013 takeover of a Swarthmore College board meeting by a mob of student activists. The president of Swarthmore at the time, Rebecca Chopp, sat in the audience and did nothing, even after students who were not part of the protest appealed to her to restore order. That event too was caught on video, and Chopp persisted afterwards in defending her inaction in the face of tactics of intimidation and lawlessness.

Stanger Participated in the Protest

But there are deeper layers of irony here. If you examine the video carefully, Stanger makes several appearances before she goes on stage. At one point (29:08), Stanger is to be found grinning at the chant, “Hey hey, ho, ho, Charles Murray has got to go.” At another (30:05) Stanger is broadly smiling as the crowd chants, “Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray go away.” Still later, as the crowd chants, “Black Lives Matter,” Stanger raises her hands above her head (33:20) and claps along. Soon after, the camera pans across her again (33:34) and she is chanting the slogan as well as clapping.

In other words, Stanger was not just present at the protest, but participated in it.

That his assigned interlocutor would publicly participate in an effort to prevent him from speaking at all is, I guess, part of the postmodern academy.

That his assigned interlocutor would publicly participate in an effort to prevent him from speaking at all is, I guess, part of the postmodern academy. Murray tweeted after the event, “Allison Stanger. She’s on the left. And fearless, funny, smart as can be, and as devoted to academic freedom as anyone I’ve ever met.”

Stanger is the Russell J. Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury, and a figure to be reckoned with: Harvard Ph.D., a graduate diploma in economics from London School of Economics, author of some important scholarly works, including “One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy” (Yale University Press).

To this, we can add outpatient at Porter Hospital and martyr to President Patton’s commitment to non-interference in the right of Middlebury students to enforce their prohibition on free speech in their own creative way.

President Patton, however, was “deeply disappointed by the events that [she] witnessed.” She issued a letter to the community expressing her displeasure.

New York Times Claims to Support Free Speech on Campus, Then Proceeds to Blame Violence on Campuses on Right Wing "Narrative" of Phony Oppression

When a newspaper can no longer simply denounce a violent black bloc mob's assault on men and one woman without trying to excuse it away as somehow the fault of the victims of the attack, then I would say we're pretty close to the edge.

The left is now in war mode, where violence in the service of tribe is sometimes (by which I mean "almost always") excusable.

..

I've been told for years about the growing threat of right-wing extremism and how right-wing leaders have to police and denounce their own to keep from encouraging extremists to commit violence, and this is the New York Times' response to left wing violence?

To encourage it and excuse it away, precisely as they've (erroneously) accused right wing "leaders" of doing for years?

I heard the media shriek and whine that Trump supporters would jeer and mock Katy Tur. That was a threat to Democracy Itself, they lectured.

Now their Shock Troops are beating people in the street, and their response is to claim right-wingers are making up sob stories and thereby... provoking their own beat-downs?

Liberal students at Middlebury College send professor to the hospital

On Thursday, hundreds of students at Middlebury College shouted down political scientist Charles Murray, forcing him to deliver his remarks in a private room via a live web stream.

While he delivered his remarks, student troublemakers pulled the building’s fire alarm multiple times. Shouting could be heard in the background throughout the live-streamed lecture and subsequent conversation with Political Science Professor Allison Stanger.

When Stanger and Murray left the building, things turned violent, ..

“The protestors then violently set upon the car, rocking it, pounding on it, jumping on and try to prevent it from leaving campus,” he said. “At one point a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car. Public Safety officers were able, finally, to clear the way to allow the vehicle to leave campus.

“During this confrontation outside McCullough, one of the demonstrators pulled Prof. Stanger’s hair and twisted her neck,” Burger continued. “She was attended to at Porter Hospital later and (on Friday) is wearing a neck brace.”

There will be no investigation, no suspensions, no expulsions and certainly no criminal proceedings. The law does not apply to leftists.

Taking care of drug felons, Michigan style

SAGINAW (WWJ/AP) – A man whose drug-related prison sentence was commuted in November by President Barack Obama has been fatally shot at a federal halfway house in Michigan after two men with assault-style rifles sought him out, police said.

Two men wearing masks went into Bannum Place in Saginaw on Monday night with plans to kill 31-year-old Damarlon Thomas, a former Saginaw gang member. Lt. David Kaiser said Thomas was shot several times by one of the men as some of the roughly two dozen people at the home were held at gunpoint.

Guess the race of the people involved.

In Seattle you can shoot people you think are Trump supporters and get away with it.

A man who shot someone outside a speech at the University of Washington (UW) by conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos said his victim was a “white supremacist,” and police let the shooter go, even as the victim is hospitalized with life-threatening injuries.

In what appears to be a case of mistaken identity by the “anti-racism” vigilante, the shooting victim later turned out to be a supporter of Bernie Sanders.

And the University President understands ...

And the university president, Ana Mari Cauce, wrote a letter Saturday that focused not on why one of the protesters attempting to stop the speech had shot someone, but instead questioned why the college had allowed the event to be held in the first place.

"You are safe here in Chicago" he said without irony!

Attempted Attack on Trump at Dayton Ohio rally March 12, 2016

How stupid and vicious do elites think 'we' are?

How stupid and vicious do they think we are? That's a question that I think explains a lot of things about politics and society today — and about this year's unpredictable presidential race.

The "we" in that question are ordinary citizens and the "they" are political and media elites who hold them in contempt. Which they do over and over again by trying to obfuscate and cover up the source and motives of terrorist attacks.

Barack Obama, who refuses to use phrases akin to "Islamist terrorism," is a prime offender, but far from the only one. His predecessor George W. Bush, after the attacks of September 11, made a point of visiting mosques and calling Islam a religion of peace.

Undoubtedly he then feared that many Americans would attack and assault Muslims, real or perceived, and a very few such attacks occurred. But government statistics count far fewer "hate crimes" against Muslims than against Jews.

Nonetheless Obama still behaves as if any suggestion that terrorists shouting "Allahu akbar!" has something to do with Islam will spark massacres and persecution across the country. The American people are seen as a great beast, incapable of reason or cool judgment. Stupid and vicious.

So they must be reminded that they are not morally superior to terrorists. At a national prayer breakfast, Obama felt obliged to remind Americans that Christians attacked Muslims — in the Crusades, 800 years ago.

Others have followed his example. In a press conference earlier this month Philadelphia police officials described how a Muslim dressed in a white religious robe fired multiple rounds at a police officer, "in the name of Islam," as he said after his arrest. You could see it on videotape.

At which point Philadelphia Mayor James Kenney proclaimed, "In no way, shape or form does anyone in this room believe that Islam or the teaching of Islam has anything to do with what you've seen on the screen."

How stupid and vicious does he think we are?

Actually, it's not that hard for ordinary people to keep in mind two different ideas that the elites think they'll find confusing — that most terrorists these days are Muslims, and that most Muslims are not terrorists. We keep similar things in mind every day. For example, we notice that most dangerously aggressive drivers are men, but also that most men are not dangerously aggressive drivers.

Still, dangerous drivers are dangerous. Americans are tired of hearing "Islam is a religion of peace" when for an uncomfortably large minority of Muslims these days it's the opposite. So they have been flocking to Donald Trump when he calls for barring all Muslims from entering the U.S. And conservatives who in another year would upbraid Trump for flunking multiple litmus tests are defending him because he dares to utter forbidden truths.

Americans may be noticing as well how far political correctness has gone in Europe, especially Germany. European and American elites praised Chancellor Angela Merkel for promising to take in 1 million mostly Muslim, mostly male refugees. Why can't America be so generous?

But ordinary people, there and here, have seen how police, municipal and national officials have covered up migrants' behavior on New Year's. Even mass assaults on women in Cologne and other cities, and how print and broadcast media eagerly cooperated. Cellphone cameras told the story which elite media wanted to ignore.

It's a story, as even some Americans notice, that shows the underside of a European multiculturalism that insists that all cultures are morally equal, except ours, which is worse. The result is that authorities don't demand that Muslims respect the rights of women and gays, as in Rotherham, England, where they allowed immigrants to degrade 1,400 women for a decade, lest they be called racist.

Ordinary people can see, when elites allow them to see, that this gets things upside down. Human rights, toleration of those who are different, safety for those who exercise freedom of expression — these are products of the West, not the rest.

The hard question is how far tolerant societies should tolerate the intolerant. Societies value freedom of expression, but not when those include freedom to assault and kill. Societies are ready to welcome others, but not those whose values are discordant with the freedoms they strive to uphold.

Ordinary Americans, I think, have a better sense of how to get these questions right, without dissolving into irrational hatred, than the elites who look down on them as stupid and vicious.

The Democrats’ Theme for 2016 Is Totalitarianism

Kevin Williamson, at NR:

At the beginning of December, Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell asked Secretary of State John Kerry whether Charles and David Koch, two libertarian political activists, should be considered — his remarkable words — “an enemy of the state.” He posed the same question about Exxon, and John Kerry, who could have been president of these United States, said that he looked forward to the seizure of Exxon’s assets for the crime of “proselytizing” impermissibly about the question of global warming.

For those of you keeping track, the Democrats and their allies on the left have now: voted in the Senate to repeal the First Amendment, proposed imprisoning people for holding the wrong views on global warming, sought to prohibit the showing of a film critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton, proposed banning politically unpopular academic research, demanded that funding politically unpopular organizations and causes be made a crime and that the RICO organized-crime statute be used as a weapon against targeted political groups.

They have filed felony charges against a Republican governor for vetoing a piece of legislation, engaged in naked political persecutions of members of Congress, and used the IRS and the ATF as weapons against political critics.

They shout down unpopular ideas or simply forbid nonconforming views from being heard there in the first place. They have declared academic freedom an “outdated concept” and have gone the full Orwell, declaring that freedom is oppressive and that they should not be expected to tolerate ideas that they do not share. They are demanding mandatory ideological indoctrination sessions for nonconforming students. They have violently assaulted students studying in libraries and assaulted student journalists documenting their activities.

They have staged dozens of phony hate crimes and sexual assaults as a pretext for persecuting unpopular organizations and people.

What they cannot achieve by legislation or litigation, they seek to achieve by simple violence, left-wing activists having smashed, looted, and burned portions of Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, where Koreans and other Asian minorities were specifically targeted. As on college campuses, they have made a point of assaulting journalists documenting their violence. They have rioted in Philadelphia and in other cities.

Read the whole thing.

Muslims hide the terrorists in their midst

From The Times of London:

Muslims ‘stay silent’ on extremism tip-off scheme.

Muslims are boycotting the country’s key anti-radicalisation programme, The Times can disclose, after it emerged that less than a tenth of extremism tip-offs were coming directly from the community or faith leaders.

The revelation that there were fewer than 300 community tip-offs in six months to the government’s Prevent programme will raise concern that the police are being denied information that might prevent terrorist attacks.

This is what happens when you make every effort to accommodate Muslims who don't assimilate.  The fools on the Left, and that includes the fools in the FBI,  are still under the delusion that making nice will get Muslims to give up the radicals in their community.  They are eluding themselves and getting their neighbors killed.  But that's the price of moral superiority.   

MO-TIVATION UNKNOWN

The man who went on a stabbing rampage Wednesday at the University of California, Merced, praised Allah in a two-page manifesto recovered from his body, the Merced County Sheriff said Thursday …

[Sheriff Verne Warnke] told a crowd of reporters Thursday “there is nothing to indicate this was anything other than a teenage boy who got upset with fellow classmates.”

Asked if the manifesto made any references to Allah, Warnke said there were, but dismissed any suggestion that Mohammad was motivated by religion.

From the comments:

Reports of these incidents follow the same old tiresome pattern. It’d be more interesting if, when there actually is nothing to do with Islam, a reporter asked about it.

Could this be a likely scenario?

Reporter: Is this one of those nothing-to-do-with-Islam attacks?

Police spokesperson: No, not at all. It has nothing to do with Islam.

Reporter: Can I quote you on that? That it has nothing to do with Islam?

Police spokesperson: No, absolutely not, because it has nothing to do with Islam.

Reporter: Sorry, I’m confused. If you won’t say it has nothing to do with Islam, are you suggesting it could have something to do with Islam?

Police spokesperson: No, I’m not, because it has nothing to do with Islam.

Reporter: OK, so then it is a nothing-to-do-with-Islam attack.

Police spokesperson: No, you cannot say that! It has nothing to do with Islam!

Reporter: Riiight.

Anti-cop violence spreads as illegal immigrant gang member slugs deputy sitting in car

An illegal immigrant MS-13 gang member the Obama administration had released on bond committed an unprovoked attack on a sheriff’s deputy, slugging the deputy as he worked on a traffic report while sitting in his car, the Frederick County, Md., sheriff’s department said Friday.

Jose Misael Reyes-Reyes, 18, had been arrested in May on weapons charges and in June on charges of malicious destruction of property, but federal immigration authorities had left him free on bond while he awaited a deportation hearing, the sheriff’s office said.

Given his age, Mr. Reyes-Reyes was potentially part of the recent surge of illegal immigrant children that overwhelmed the Border Patrol over the last few years, and who have now been shipped to communities across the country.

Mr. Reyes-Reyes came upon Deputy First Class Greg Morton Thursday morning as the deputy was in his marked police vehicle finishing up an accident report. The sheriff’s office said Mr. Reyes-Reyes began banging on a back window of the vehicle, and when Deputy Morton turned to look the man reached through the half-open window and slugged the deputy in the face.

Even after Deputy Morton got Mr. Reyes-Reyes under control and handcuffed him, but man tried to escape, kicking the deputy again, the sheriff’s office said.

Mr. Reyes-Reyes is “a validated MS-13 gang member,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement. MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha-13, is an international gang started by Salvadorans in Los Angeles in the 1980s. It expanded operations to Central America after many of its leaders were deported, and has since spread across the U.S., including a particular presence in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., which has been the destination for many Central American immigrants.

It’s unclear why Mr. Reyes-Reyes was out on bond, given the priority Homeland Security officials say they place on going after illegal immigrant gang members.

I suspect that the level of violence will increase. As with all things in the Age of Obama, I wonder if it's the result of stupidity or part of a plan.

Campus stabber's manifesto included 'praise for Allah,' plan for beheading

Nothing to see here.

Lone wolf attack.

Press wonders what his motive was.

Faisal Mohammad stabbed four people in The University of California Merced campus

Another one of those Lone Wolf attacks that has absolutely nothing to do with Islam.

A reclusive student shot dead by police after stabbing four people in a California university campus attack ‘had far greater intentions to do damage’, Merced County Sheriff said Wednesday.

Faisal Mohammad, a freshman who majored in computer science and engineering at the University of California was carrying highly flammable petroleum jelly, ziptie handcuffs, night vision goggles, duct tape and a hammer in his backpack when he was shot in the back by cops.

In reference to the petroleum jelly, Sheriff Vern Warnke said: 'He had poor man's C4' - C4 being the dense, putty-like explosive used widely by the military and demolition teams.

Moments before he had 'smiled' as he used a 10-inch hunting knife to stab two students, a campus construction worker and a female teacher in a terrifying attack that was praised by an Isis-linked Twitter account.

However police have insisted his attacked were based on 'personal animosities' and a 'vendetta', not a political agenda.

And they know that because ...

The attack drew praise Thursday from a Twitter account associated with the Islamic State, Fox News reported.

'May Allah accept him,' read the tweet in Arabic just minutes after Mohammad's name was divulged by campus authorities.

.... the impeccably multicultural college administration moved to rule out a political motive on Wednesday. 

UC Merced Chancellor Dorthy Leland said: 'At this point, it would be irresponsible to draw such conclusions based solely on the ethnicity of the suspect.

'At this point in time, the preliminary evidence suggests that freshman computer science and engineering student Faisal Mohammad of Santa Clara appears to have been motivated by personal animosities, not a political agenda.'

So he had personal animosities against four random students, a teacher and a construction worker.  I believe that ... I'll believe anything.  

Ankara explosions leave more than 80 dead - officials

The Religion of Peace at work.  It was a "peace rally."

Banners for the planned peace rally were used to cover victims' bodies

At U-M, Sexual Violence Includes 'Discounting Feelings,' 'Withholding Sex'

No, really!

The sex police at U of M claim:

The definitions of behaviors of violence … describe most accurately what occurs in an abusive relationship,” [U-M spokesperson Rick Fitzgerald] said in an email. “Those behaviors not in the context of violence are not abusive. A reader of this site would recognize that it’s described as one behavior in the context of a pattern of behaviors to maintain power and control over an intimate partner."

I respond that this is a university full of scholars. Scholars are people who know how to make fine distinctions. They should not create rules that are vague or open to misinterpretation.