The American left is seriously out of control. Now it is dangerous

The Left's hysteria over Trump's victory in 2016 has escalated into something quite beyond mere hysteria. Now the leftists are well and truly dangerous. Antifa, the fascist organization that protests anything and everything with which it disagrees, is violent, very violent. These people show up with weapons, wearing masks, and attack anyone they perceive to be in opposition to their own warped ideology.

The Grand Old Flag

That's Cagney as prototype singer-songwriter George M Cohan in a scene purporting to recreate the first night of Cohan's show George Washington, Jr. It wasn't quite like that on stage, but that's where "You're a Grand Old Flag" was introduced to the world - at the Herald Square Theatre in New York on February 6th 1906. In the course of the number, he took a flag and, head cocked to one side, marched it back and forth across the stage - a routine the crowd loved so much he repeated it, to one tune or another, in many subsequent shows (and, via James Cagney, in that smash hit Forties biopic). But this song was special. Cohan saw himself as the embodiment of the American spirit.

Liberal Loons Think This Patriotic Symbol is Racist

CrowdStrikeOut: Mueller’s Own Report Undercuts Its Core Russia-Meddling Claims

There is serious doubt that the Russians really meddled in the 2016 election.

While the 448-page Mueller report found no conspiracy between Donald Trump's campaign and Russia, it offered voluminous details to support the sweeping conclusion that the Kremlin worked to secure Trump's victory. The report claims that the interference operation occurred "principally" on two fronts: Russian military intelligence officers hacked and leaked embarrassing Democratic Party documents, and a government-linked troll farm orchestrated a sophisticated and far-reaching social media campaign that denigrated Hillary Clinton and promoted Trump.

But a close examination of the report shows that none of those headline assertions are supported by the report’s evidence or other publicly available sources. They are further undercut by investigative shortcomings and the conflicts of interest of key players involved:

• The report uses qualified and vague language to describe key events, indicating that Mueller and his investigators do not actually know for certain whether Russian intelligence officers stole Democratic Party emails, or how those emails were transferred to WikiLeaks.
• The report's timeline of events appears to defy logic. According to its narrative, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced the publication of Democratic Party emails not only before he received the documents but before he even communicated with the source that provided them.
• There is strong reason to doubt Mueller’s suggestion that an alleged Russian cutout called Guccifer 2.0 supplied the stolen emails to Assange.
• Mueller’s decision not to interview Assange – a central figure who claims Russia was not behind the hack – suggests an unwillingness to explore avenues of evidence on fundamental questions.
• U.S. intelligence officials cannot make definitive conclusions about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer servers because they did not analyze those servers themselves. Instead, they relied on the forensics of CrowdStrike, a private contractor for the DNC that was not a neutral party, much as “Russian dossier” compiler Christopher Steele, also a DNC contractor, was not a neutral party. This puts two Democrat-hired contractors squarely behind underlying allegations in the affair – a key circumstance that Mueller ignores.
• Further, the government allowed CrowdStrike and the Democratic Party's legal counsel to submit redacted records, meaning CrowdStrike and not the government decided what could be revealed or not regarding evidence of hacking.
• Mueller’s report conspicuously does not allege that the Russian government carried out the social media campaign. Instead it blames, as Mueller said in his closing remarks, "a private Russian entity" known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA).
• Mueller also falls far short of proving that the Russian social campaign was sophisticated, or even more than minimally related to the 2016 election. As with the collusion and Russian hacking allegations, Democratic officials had a central and overlooked hand in generating the alarm about Russian social media activity.
• John Brennan, then director of the CIA, played a seminal and overlooked role in all facets of what became Mueller’s investigation: the suspicions that triggered the initial collusion probe; the allegations of Russian interference; and the intelligence assessment that purported to validate the interference allegations that Brennan himself helped generate. Yet Brennan has since revealed himself to be, like CrowdStrike and Steele, hardly a neutral party -- in fact a partisan with a deep animus toward Trump.

Trump Speech on the 4th of July 2019

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:

‘Whatever It Is, I’m Against It’

Are they nuts?


The speed with which the Betsy Ross flag was deemed racist is stunning.

This is true. In a couple of days, we’ve gone from a celebrity saying a flag is bad, to a major corporation indulging that judgment, to presidential candidates and governors blithely confirming and cementing it. In my view, though, the scariest part is not so much “how quick it has been,” but that there has been no argument or explanation to speak of. Upon the instant, professional progressivism has accepted the change as if it were taking orders from on high. “The flag is in the bad column now? Got it. Will amend attitude and proceed accordingly.”

Asked about the flag, Beto O’Rourke said, “I think it’s really important to take into account the impression that kind of symbol would have for many of our fellow Americans, respect the decision Nike made and grateful for the conversation.”

What “impression”? Which “fellow Americans”? What “conversation”?

Read the whole thing and, yes, they are nuts. These people are the walking wounded of the culture wars. They have to be terrified that whatever they do today, whatever they say, what they wear, what they eat, where they go, will tomorrow be denounced by some crazy nut with a megaphone.  It resembles the Soviet Union under Stalin where today's "good communist" says something that Stalin dislikes and the next day he's shot and airbrushed out of the pictures.  It's Stalinism.  It's craaaaaazy!

JULY 4th QUOTE OF THE DAY:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

—Calvin Coolidge, Address at the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on July 5, 1926.


Thanks and a tip of the hat to Instapundit.

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.

The Bush Pipe Dream

No one expected Iraq to turn into Denmark.  What the Bush administration expected was that by having elections, giving people an opportunity to choose their own leaders, Iraq would become a modern democracy.  They were foolish and I predicted that they would fail. 

 

But neither is there any reason to believe that “Muslim Arabs alone of all peoples are destined to live in tyranny forever, unable to sustain any kind of halfway-decent halfway-democratic government” without an interim period of benevolent rule by people who believe in decent democratic government.

The problem with Muslim society is Muslim culture which has several thousand years of embedded experience of tyranny and corruption reinforcing all the actions that militate against the decent democratic government.

The belief that Muslim countries can convert the modern democracies on the European model is as much a pipe dream on the Right as the belief on the Left that Socialism will work if only we give it another try.

Japan is an example of a country with no history of democracy being converted into a decent democracy.  Germany – with the failed example of the Weimar period – had no history of being a successful democracy, yet it is today.  But before they were “turned loose” as it were, they experienced decades of military occupation following the Second World War.  In fact, to this day, there are American military bases in both countries.

Britain left behind it scores of countries they once colonized and then set free, many of which have become stable, decent democracies, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and India. 

The big difference between the success of the British Empire and the Allied victory in World War 2 was the imposition of decent rule by a foreign agent who believed in honest, representative government at home and the imposition of good government on a people and culture who were not familiar with any of the basic tenants of a decent representative republic.  

The experience in Iraq demonstrates that in a culture ruled by a dictator you will have rampant corruption and – in the case of most Muslim countries – a tribal system in which the first loyalty is to the tribe rather than to the nation.  Combine that with unreformed Islam and all you will get from an election is the elevation of the next theocratic dictator whose objective is to gather wealth for himself and his tribe. 

DRUDGE: "Antifa" keeps attacking journalists despite sympathy from national media

The MSM's ground troops - the Masked Black Shirts - do the work the press won't do by physical attacks on those who oppose the  Left.

Masked individuals at an Antifa rally Saturday violently attacked Portland journalist Andy Ngo, sending him to the hospital.

While some members of the national media — including CNN hosts Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo — have been sympathetic toward Antifa in the past, that hasn’t kept Antifa members from attacking the journalists actually covering them on the ground.

Meanwhile lots of Antifa sympathizers in the press claim that Andy Ngo is the one responsible for being attacked.   He brought it on himself. 

They're calling attacking people in the street an "information war."  No, jackass, that a real war, where people get wounded and killed.

Insinuendo: Why the Mueller Report Doth Repeat So Much

The first thing to note about the Mueller report is just how contentious it is. It isn’t a set of findings so much as an assertion of what the findings might have been if only there had been more evidence. It is like a closing argument in a criminal case already dismissed for lack of evidence but in which the prosecutor is determined to redeem what he can of his case. Mueller turns to a variety of strategies: hectoring repetition; the use of extraneous detail to add heft to flimsy assertion; and a resort to insinuation and innuendo to prejudice the reader against those who have escaped the dock.

Papadopoulos Again and Again

Ever since the debunking of Trump-Russia dirt paid for by the Democrats and compiled by the opposition firm Fusion GPS, government officials and conspiracists have insisted that the Steele dossier had nothing to do with launching the investigation. The story is that the FBI flew into action after learning that Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos had made an alarming statement to an Australian diplomat in a London bar, telling him about Russian intentions to interfere with the U.S. election.

From the first page of his report, the special counsel is eager to establish the narrative that that Papadopoulos, not Steele, sparked the initial investigation. Mueller writes that in May 2016 “Papadopoulos had suggested to a representative of [a] foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.”

But it’s not enough to say it once. Come page 6, Mueller writes, “Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to candidate Clinton.”

Mueller repeats this claim nearly word for word again on pages 81, 89, and 93.

At least page 192 offers a hint of variation: The FBI “approached Papadopoulos for an interview” because of “his suggestion to a foreign government representative that Russia had indicated that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to candidate Clinton.”

Such relentless repetition might be dismissed as lazy cut-and-paste writing. But repetition is an ancient and effective tool of rhetoric. The Greeks called it epimone; the Romans, commoratio. It can be used subtly and powerfully, as in “Brutus is an honorable man," or it can be employed in a clumsy effort to pound home a weak claim, as in “Papadopoulos suggested…that the Trump Campaign…”

What makes the claim weak?

The problem starts with “Papadopoulos suggested.” What exactly did he say? “Suggested” implies he expressed himself indirectly. The report’s use of that squishy verb all six times it refers to the conversation is an admission that Papadopoulos did not directly make the explosive claim that allegedly spurred the FBI into action.

The next part of the sentence is not only vague, but misleading – “Papadopoulos suggested … that the Trump campaign had received indications.”

This implies that information allegedly given to Papadopoulos – an adviser to the campaign – was shared with the entire campaign. This is especially misleading because the report later says it found no evidence that Papadopoulos told anyone else on the campaign about the emails.

And then there’s the descriptor “received indications,” which is even more amorphous than “suggested.” An “indication” could be anything from a light flashing Morse code to one of the grifters in “The Sting” putting a finger to the side of his nose. If Papadopoulos was told something, why not simply write he “was told”? The downside of the simple construction, from a prosecutor’s point of view, is that it lacks the implication that something furtive and sneaky is going on. “Receiving indications” by contrast, sounds suitably shady.

Where did those indications come from? The “Russian government,” according to the special counsel’s report. Finally, a precise and concrete claim. Unfortunately, it is also false. The source of his information was Joseph Mifsud, whom the special counsel describes as a “London-based professor who had connections to Russia and traveled to Moscow in April 2016.” There is a difference between someone with unspecified “connections to Russia” and the “Russian government.”

The Mueller report makes another incorrect claim when it states the Russian government offered to “assist the [Trump] Campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton.”

There is no evidence that Papadopoulos said anything about a plan to “assist” Trump through “anonymous” action to the man in the London bar – whom the report oddly refers to as a “representative of a foreign government” when everyone knows he is Alexander Downer. As Downer told The Australian newspaper in April 2018, Papadopoulos “mentioned the Russians might use material that they have on Hillary Clinton in the lead-up to the election, which may be damaging.”

Put these corrections all together and the special counsel’s oft-repeated statement – “Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton” – should actually read “Papadopoulos said to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer that a professor who had traveled to Russia had told him Russia had damaging information about Hillary Clinton and might release it before the election.” This latter version isn’t just a far more accurate representation of what Papadopoulos said; it is also far less suggestive of any wrongdoing. But of course, if there’s less suggestion of wrongdoing there’s also less justification for the FBI to have taken the extreme step of investigating a presidential campaign.

Read the whole thing.

Living In an Age of Hate

Advocacy of incivility and violence isn’t coming only from the zany far left. It finds a home in formerly respectable news outlets, like the Washington Post and the New York Times, as well as among Democratic Party office-holders.

Democrats obviously think that the “new rules” will never apply to them. Why is that? Evidently, they believe–correctly–that we conservatives are better people than they are. But our patience is not infinite.

The Washington Post published an article by Stephanie Wilkinson, a restaurant owner who became famous in June of last year when she refused to serve White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders and told Sanders and her family to leave the restaurant. Wilkinson’s staff then followed the Sanders group in protest as they tried to find another place to eat.

In her new article, Wilkinson discussed the case of The Aviary, a trendy bar in Chicago where a waitress recently spat on Eric Trump, the president’s son. Wilkinson wrote that the incident, along with her own decision to oust Sanders, shows that in the age of Trump “new rules apply” in public accommodations: Americans who work for the administration or support the president should stay away.

Meanwhile, Christian cake bakers have to serve everyone but liberal cafe owners can pick and choose who they will serve?

The NY Times publishes an article by Professor Cronin-Furman describing the actions by employees of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, comparing their actions to the Holocaust and genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda.

These comparisons are so idiotic as not to require refutation. But the New York Times publishes them; not because they are remotely plausible, but because the Times doesn’t care.  The Times exists solely to launch one hysterical attack after another against President Trump on behalf of the Democratic Party.. 

Meanwhile, their Brown Shirt cadres take to the streets to beat up the opposition, as Antifa did to a Conservative reporter in Seattle, sending him to the hospital.

The Democratic Party has abandoned all norms of civility and constitutional government. Somehow, though, liberals believe they are immune from having to live by their own “new rules.” They sow the wind but think they never will reap the whirlwind. Why?

Liberals act as though they are spoiling for a civil war or at least a slow-motion approximation thereof. Is that really what they want? Fighting in the streets? And, evidently, the restaurants? Do they have reason to think they would fare well if they actually got what they claim to want?

We conservatives are, of course, morally superior to leftists, and far more pacific, as they believe. But, as I said, our patience is not infinite. There are many places in America where, unlike Portland, fascists would meet with a strong reaction if they tried to beat up bystanders on the street, burn down buildings, and smash store windows. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and their Democratic Party seem entirely oblivious to this fact.

Joe Biden Learns You Can Never Be Woke Enough

Kurt Schlichter; harsh but fair.

By any sane standard, Joe Biden is not a racist. He’s a clod, a creepy leech, terminally dumb, and he says cringy things (including about race), but the idea that he harbors any vicious hatred for people based on their race is really, really far-fetched. Sure, there’s a statistically insignificant chance that Sleepy Floppy Gropey Joe is really Seggy Joe, wistfully recalling the days of segregation and Jim Crow – after all, those are Democrat inventions – but it’s … unlikely. But that doesn’t matter. The Social Justice Whiners who totally dominate the Democrat Party have made sure that neither he nor any of the other liberals fighting for the chance to be crushed by Donald Trump in 2020 will be measured by any sane standard.

Joe recently mentioned how he was able to work with the loathsome Democrat racists infesting the Senate when he got there in the early '70s. They were a different breed of loathsome Democrat racists back then. They hated everyone who was not white. Today’s loathsome Democrat racists now hate everyone who is, but they are more flexible than that. The loathsome Democrats of today are not merely racists, but sexist religious bigots who hate men, observant Jews and Christians, as well as individual members of sexual and racial minorities who reject the poisonous ideology of progressivism. Their word for this evolution is “progress.”...

Joe was happy to slime Republicans with the same kind of garbage he’s lately been pelted with. Remember what he said about Mitt Romney, who is useless for dozens of reasons but none of which is that he hates black people? Joe said: “They’re gonna put y’all back in chains!”

Well Joe, enjoy being filleted by your own. We’re over here laughing, you jerk.

Read the whole thing.

Liberal Fascism - part 2019

The Washington Post and the NY Times have morphed into Der Sturmer so gradually we hardly noticed.  Meanwhile, their Brown Shirt cadres take to the streets to beat up the opposition.

The toxicity of the resistance to President Trump has risen in recent days, with the nation's most respected newspapers publishing rationalizations for denying Trump supporters public accommodation and for doxxing career federal employees, while a journalist found himself under physical attack from the so-called anti-fascist group Antifa, which has stepped up its violent activities since Trump's election.

Read the whole thing.

Antifa rules Portland with the same impunity that the Ku Klux Klan ruled Birmingham in the 1960s

Journalist Andy Ngo after being beaten up by Antifa goons

Andy Ngo is a Portland-based journalist (for Quillette) who has made it his business to document the violence and insanity of Antifa in his city. Today they got him. They beat him up and stole his camera equipment.

One gets the impression that Antifa rules Portland with the same impunity that the Ku Klux Klan ruled Birmingham in the 1960s. Do they actually have police in Portland? Do they have functioning government there?

Let me answer that question.

The Democrats that ran Birmingham and the Democrats who run Portland approve and support violence against people they hate.  And they hate normal people.

Ted Wheeler is the mayor of Portland, a city where the violent far left gets to beat people up with impunity. He's a modern-day Bull Connor.

Do Democrats hate the country?

The Diplomad 2.0 commented on the Democrat debates.

Biden can't keep up, as revealed by the tentative way in which he raised his hand in accord with the others that we should provide "free" medical care for illegal aliens. At times, Biden reminded me of Ted Kennedy when asked why he wanted to become President and couldn't say.

I say all that about Biden while acknowledging that he's the best of the Dem bunch--kinda like when I declare American universities junk but the world's best . . . junk. The others range from absolute delusional morons to crazy Communists. Any one of them would make Carter and Obama look like great and patriotic presidents. Biden, at least, doesn't seem to hate the country: A low bar, but one that the other candidates can't seem to clear--they seem auditioning for the CPUSA Chairmanship.

If, per America's founders, a republic presupposes virtue; whatever it is we are now presupposes a lack of it.

Mark Steyn:

But Boris [Johnson] in a certain sense is taking Trump to the next level - that, as the bounds of acceptable politics have become ever narrower and more constrained, only a certain size of personality can bust through them, and thus in such a world a low moral character is not faute de mieux but vital and necessary - at least if you're serious about screwing over the EU commissars. If, per America's founders, a republic presupposes virtue; whatever it is we are now presupposes a lack of it.

...

Trump is president and Boris is within grasp of Downing Street because regular life-sized conventional politics has failed. The "Trump Derangement Syndrome" types are missing the point: he's their creation. Enough of the electorate has concluded that a choice between Woke-fevered Democrats and Koch-funded Republicans is insufficient...


If respectable politicians are forbidden to raise certain subjects, the voters will turn to unrespectable ones. The people are telling their rulers something important here. The longer the ruling class - in Washington, London, Paris and elsewhere - refuse to listen, the worse it is going to be...

Trump - and Boris Johnson - are where they are because they are outsize characters who will not be bound by the Lilliputian bastards on the Left who have so angered normal people that they are willing, eager even, to find a way of kicking the Left Wing Fascists in the nuts.

History repeats itself, first as farce, then as political debate.

It was not that many years ago that men wanting to be women and having babies was a joke. Today if you say men can't have babies Democrats will stone you.

HITLER’S DREAM IS BEING ACHIEVED

Jews are being driven out of Europe.  Read the whole thing.

Judenrein Europe

For millennia Europe was the center of diaspora life but as Jews continue fleeing the continent, by the end of this century all that’s left will be a Jewish graveyard

In his earliest speeches Adolf Hitler made clear that his primary mission was to make Germany, and then all Europe, judenrein—free of Jews. He failed only because of the Allied victory but today, slowly, inexorably and, for the most part, legally and largely unconsciously, Europe is fulfilling the Nazi aspiration. ...

Progressives and the media prefer to blame anti-Semitism primarily on Europe’s deplorables, but the far right does not constitute the only, or even the primary threat, to European Jews. A detailed survey from the University of Oslo found that in Scandinavia, Germany, Britain, and France, most anti-Semitic violence comes from Muslims, including recent immigrants. Similarly a poll of European Jews found the majority of incidents of anti-Semitism came from either Muslims or from the left; barely 13% traced it to right-wingers. Violence against Jews is worst in places like the migrant dominated suburbs of Paris or Malmo in Sweden.

In the US, Jew hatred is centered in the Left and the Democrat party and in Academia.