Posts Tagged ‘Civil War’

LinkSwarm for June 5, 2020

Friday, June 5th, 2020

Congratulations on surviving a week of Antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioting. The riots themselves seem to have mostly petered out, but it looks like the federal prosecutions are just getting started. But we interrupt our regularly scheduled riot ruminations to bring a deeply unexpected bit of good news:

  • The U.S. economy added 2.5 million jobs in May. “Unexpectedly!” as job gains under Republican Presidents (and job losses under Democratic ones) always seem to be. We still have a huge self-inflicted hole to climb out out, but these numbers suggest that not only are we in a V-shaped recession, we’re already on the other side of the V.
  • Stating the obvious: “Democrats Are Using Antifa to Foment Revolution.”

    To set the reality in which Antifa plans to prosecute the Democrats’ promised “revolution,” it needs to attack all the pillars of society. Throughout the country, they burned post offices, police precincts, banks, gas stations. city halls, and courts — they hit the CNN Center, and now churches.

    Barack Obama started the “fundamental transformation of the United States of America.” Yet, this is not Obama’s Antifa. A failure as president, he did manage to accomplish one important prerequisite for this rebellion. He instilled in the left the understanding that “change” must be forced upon an unwilling electorate.

    With this insight, Antifa has transitioned from pajama-boy blobs of perpetually offended miscreants, mostly drawn from misanthropes who were picked last in high school, into a trained guerilla force with cool uniforms. Fascists like cool uniforms.

    Antifa, the paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party, has spent the last three years recruiting, and organizing. They have mobilized and learned tactics. They have a plan and are working hard to cover all the bases. Starting slow, they probed to find what government would allow, media would trumpet, and the public would endure.

    When they burned the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis, they knew they could get away with anything.

    And, as we have seen, they can adapt. This was evident Monday night in New York City. Instead of massing together in one place to confront police, they executed lightning-fast blitzkrieg attacks in small groups. Hitting commercial properties, they ripped down plywood and broke windows. They didn’t loot or dilly dally, they moved quickly to the next target before police could respond.

    This “hit and run” tactic is perfect for their organization because spreading the destruction over larger areas negates the numerical advantage of police and national guard. They will surely take this nationwide — it is what guerillas do.

  • Night falls:

    Savagery is spreading with lightning speed across the United States, with murderous assaults on police officers and civilians and the ecstatic annihilation of businesses and symbols of the state. Welcome to a real civilization-destroying pandemic, one that makes the recent saccharine exhortations to “stay safe” and the deployment of police officers to enforce outdoor mask-wearing seem like decadent bagatelles.

    This particular form of viral chaos was inevitable, given the failure of Minneapolis’s leaders to quell the city’s growing mayhem. The violence began on Tuesday, May 26, the day after the horrifying arrest and subsequent death of George Floyd. On the night of Thursday, May 28, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey ordered the city’s Third Police Precinct evacuated as the forces of hatred, distinct from legitimate forms of protest, descended upon it for a third day in a row. The building was promptly torched, sending a powerful sign that society would not defend its most fundamental institutions of law and order.

    Snip.

    The great philosophers and poets of the West—from Aeschylus and Euripides, to Shakespeare, Hobbes, and the American Founders—understood the chaos and lust for power that lurk beneath civilization. Thanks to the magnificent infrastructure of the rule of law, we now take stability and social trust for granted. We assume that violence, once unleashed in the name of justice, can easily be put back in the bottle.

    It cannot.

    It was a signal accomplishment of both politics and science to banish humanity’s millennia-long fear of darkness. That city dwellers are now reexperiencing that fear with each fall of night is a measure of how rapidly we are losing our hard-won progress.

    (Hat tip: Powerline.)

  • “The Minneapolis Disaster has Democrat Fingerprints All Over It“:

    The Democrats chose to support Black Lives Matter and to coddle Antifa. Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison had previously posed with a copy of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, touting it as “the book that strike fear in the heart of” Trump. Now Ellison has been tweeting conspiracy theories that blame the riots on “white supremecists”. But, the only white supremacists on the scene are Democrats.

    Minneapolis’ last Republican mayor stepped down in 1974. While his city burned, Mayor Jacob Frey, a Biden supporter, attacked President Trump, whining, “weakness is refusing to take responsibility for your own actions, weakness is pointing your finger at someone else in a time of crisis.”

    That’s exactly what Frey and the Democrats have been doing in the face of the riots. Frey, a former community organizer, had repeatedly tweeted support for the Black Lives Matter racist hate group that is carrying out much of the violence. Instead of taking responsibility, Frey is blaming President Trump.

    Chief Medaria Arradondo was handpicked by Frey’s predecessor as the city’s African-American police boss after the shooting of Justine Damond, an Australian woman reporting a crime, by Mohammed Noor, a Somali Muslim officer. Arradondo replaced Janee Harteau, the first female chief of the force.

    Arradondo, like Harteau, came into office promising transformational change. He had already sued the city for racial discrimination, winning a huge settlement, and had all the right buzzwords about diversity and equity.

    “I’m committed to making sure that when the history is written, we are on the right side of history,” he declared at his first press conference, echoing Obama.

    That’s the police force on whose watch the Floyd riots began.

    This national nightmare came out of a deeply progressive city, under the administration of progressives, and happened under elected Democrat officials who embodied the progressive vision for America.

    George Floyd and the resulting riots are entirely the work of their hands.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Jeremiah Ellison, the son of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minneapolis city council member, wants to ‘dismantle the Minneapolis police department.'” It’s like they want Minnesota to flip to Trump in November. And remember how close Keith Ellison came to becoming DNC chair in 2017…
  • Other Democrats are showing the knee-jerk anti-police mentality, with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti cutting $150 million from the LAPD budget to redirect it to race hustling poverty pimps and payoffs to connected black Democrats “communities of color.”
  • Antifa Loots Austin Target Store in Coordinated Effort, DPS Confirms Special Agents Embedded in the Organization.”

    Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director Steve McGraw told the press on Tuesday that Antifa was responsible for the Sunday evening looting of the Capital Plaza Target in Austin.

    McGraw also confirmed that the department has agents embedded in Antifa, from which they received the intel.

    He said, “[The looting] was done and organized by an Antifa webpage, and of course, the surveillance that was provided over the internet to identify where law enforcement resources were staged was done over Antifa accounts.”

    Antifa is a militant left-wing movement dedicated to fighting what it qualifies as fascism, and white supremacy, in America by any means — physically violent, verbally vitriolic, or otherwise — it deems necessary. Tracing its heritage to the German antifaschistischs in the 20th century, it engages in similar street-fight tactics that frequented the Weimar Republic.

    This 21st-century version sprung up after the 2016 election and is known for sucker-punching and assaulting those whom they oppose, setting fire to buildings, and inciting riots. They have a reach that extends far beyond the United States, across continents.

    I note that Antifa, being the racists they are, looted the Target closest to the poor, still-black part of East Austin. (Hat tip: Holly Hansen.)

  • DeBlasio’s handling of the Antifa riots was so horrible that even #BlackLivesMatters slammed him.
  • Nothing says you’re dedicated to ending racism like destroying a statue dedicated to black soldiers who fought for the Union during he Civil War. Good job, Boston rioters!
  • “Spontaneous anger”:

  • Rioters try to track police officers to their homes and set their police cars on fire. It doesn’t go well for. Also, judging from their mugshots, I’m guessing they’re not the “white supremacists” we hear so much about…
  • On the other hand:

  • Chuck DeVore, who as a captain in the California Army National Guard helped put down the 1992 LA riots, covers historicla uses of the Insurrection Act, and whether invoking it is a good idea.
  • Devore also had a piece three years ago recounting his time in the LA riots.
  • Jose Nino provides an overview of China’s Communist Party oppressing their own people. Caveats: He fails to mention the brutal subjugation of Tibet, and I think his death toll estimates on starvation deaths from The Great leap Forward are somewhat on the low side.
  • UK PM Boris Johnson invites three million Hong Kong residents to come to the UK. Smart move.
  • “As expected DOJ has filed a motion with the DC Court of Appeals SUPPORTING @GenFlynn’s writ of mandamus. Slightly unexpected is how much Team Sullivan & Collusion HQ get absolutely REKT.”
  • “Federal Appeals Court Blocks Texas Democrats’ Vote-by-Mail Mandate.” Good.
  • Fredo’s Failo.
  • “The NYT has changed, become a social justice paper instead of a Left-wing paper with some social justice op-eds. Wokeness infuses it all.”
  • Nature wants to kill you:

  • Important public service announcement: Being a cybercriminal is really, really boring.
  • Last woman receiving a Civil War era pension dies. Her father, who fought for the Confederacy before switching to the Union side in 1863, married when he was 83.
  • “Nike Releases Commemorative Shoe To Honor Looters.”
  • Flashback: “Portland Police: ‘We Wish There Were Some Kind Of Organized, Armed Force That Could Fight Back Against Antifa'”
  • I smiled:

  • LinkSwarm for April 23, 2012

    Monday, April 23rd, 2012

    I have a few major posts in various stages of gestation, so here’s a LinkSwarm to tide you over in the meantime:

  • Mark Steyn on our heroic Secret Service agents: “It’s not just the entitlements. Everywhere you look in the bloated federal Leviathan, all is waste, all is excess. But the absurd imperial presidency is a good place to start. The next citizen-executive of this republic would be sending a right message were he to halve the motorcade, halve the security detail, halve the hookers.”
  • Does Obama have an $8 billion slush fund to soften the impact of cuts to the Medicare Advantage program until after the election? (Hat tip: Alphecca.)
  • Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti OKs marriage for ten year old girls. Insert your own Aisha joke here.
  • The story of the FBI’s long-running PATCON operation in the 1990s, and how it never managed to result in any serious charges (and missed Timothy McVigh to boot). (Hat tip: Supsy Street.)
  • The former President of the Maldives claims that Obama approved of the Islamist coup that deposed him. I’m not sure that’s the case, since it’s obvious that Obama doesn’t know where the Maldives are located.
  • George Washington kicks Rommel’s ass. (Hat tip: An American Housewife, Formerly in London.)
  • Pew Survey: GOP-sympathizers are better informed, more intellectually consistent, more open-minded, more empathetic and more receptive to criticism than their fellow Americans who support the Democratic Party.” (Hat tip: Alphecca.)
  • Voter fraud in Virginia. (Hat tip: Ace.)
  • An oldie, but still relevant why America hates the media.
  • Cyberattack on Iran’s oil industry?
  • Why did the South lose the Civil War?
  • Borepatch reports on the Dallas Blogshoot. I was too busy and it was a bit too long of a drive for me to make. Which is a shame, since I would have liked to try some of the machine guns, and the .50 cal. Bonus: Ponies!