This month, Netroots Nation met in Philadelphia. The choice was no accident. Pennsylvania will probably be the key swing state in 2020. Donald Trump won it by only 44,000 votes or seven-tenths of a percentage point. He lost the prosperous Philadelphia suburbs by more than Mitt Romney did in 2012 but more than made up for it with new support in “left behind” blue-collar areas such as Erie and Wilkes-Barre.
You’d think that this history would inform activists at Netroots Nation about the best strategy to follow in 2020. Not really. Instead, Netroots events seemed to alternate between pandering presentations by presidential candidates and a bewildering array of “intersectionality” and identity-politics seminars.
Senator Elizabeth Warren pledged that, if elected, she would immediately investigate crimes committed by border-control agents. Julian Castro, a former Obama-administration cabinet member, called for decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But everyone was topped by Washington governor Jay Inslee. “My first act will be to ask Megan Rapinoe to be my secretary of State,” he promised. Naming the woke, purple-haired star of the championship U.S. Women’s Soccer team, he said, would return “love rather than hate” to the center of America’s foreign policy.
Snip.
Many leftists acknowledge that Democrats are less interested than they used to be in trimming their sails to appeal to moderates. Such trimming is no longer necessary, as they see it, because the changing demographics of the country give them a built-in advantage. Almost everyone I encountered at Netroots Nation was convinced that President Trump would lose in 2020. Earlier today, Roland Martin, an African-American journalist, told ABC’s This Week, “America is changing. By 2043, we’ll be a nation [that’s] majority people of color, and that’s — that is the game here — that’s what folks don’t want to understand what’s happening in this country.”
It’s a common mistake on both the right and the left to assume that minority voters will a) always vote in large numbers and b) will vote automatically for Democrats. Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 in part because black turnout fell below what Barack Obama was able to generate. There is no assurance that black turnout can be restored in 2020.
As for other ethnic groups, a new poll by Politico/Morning Consult this month found that Trump’s approval among Hispanics is at 42 percent. An Economist/YouGov poll showed Trump at 32 percent among Hispanics; another poll from The Hill newspaper and HarrisX has it at 35 percent. In 2016, Trump won only 29 to 32 percent of the Hispanic vote.
Netroots Nation convinced me that progressive activists are self-confident, optimistic about the chances for a progressive triumph, and assured that a Trump victory was a freakish “black swan” event. But they are also deaf to any suggestion that their PC excesses had anything to do with Trump’s being in the White House. That is apt to be the progressive blind spot going into the 2020 election.
Democrats’ strategy against President Trump has been a miserable failure. Even CNN agrees!
President Trump won the Mueller showdown and now is going on offense:
Trump is just beginning to advance his arguments about what has blanketed the country since the summer of 2016. The president is going to argue that the real scandal was the attempt to keep him from winning election and, once having won, from governing. And his opponents did so by shocking means far outside the norms of law and U.S. politics. In this offensive against his tormentors of the past 36 months, the president may be aided by the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general and by John H. Durham, the U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut, to whom Attorney General William P. Barr has entrusted the investigation into what may well become “CoIntelPro 2.0.”
Even if not, Trump will make this argument simply by force of repetition of the facts we already know: The Steele Dossier was a con job from the start — opposition research passed off as intelligence and, at best, stupidly accepted as legitimate by a naive FBI. It could turn out much worse than this. Wise advice during the Mueller investigation was to wait for the endgame and not guess. The same holds for the inspector general and for Durham.
That the attack on Trump has decisively failed is not open to debate — except by people unfamiliar with sunk costs. Many political figures and folks in the commentariat heavily invested in the idea that Mueller would bring forth impeachment, and possibly even conviction and removal of the president. He did not. Impeachment proceedings, much less a successful vote on articles of impeachment, seem unlikely.
Trump has his economic boom, his deregulatory record, his military buildup and his remaking of the judiciary. He has criminal-justice reform to his credit and an overhaul of Veterans Affairs is underway. He now has a spending deal that would guarantee continuing fiscal stimulus via larger deficits, and he has four vacancies (to which he astonishingly has not nominated anyone) on the U.S. courts of appeals for the 2nd and 9th circuits, as well as scores of district court openings to remind his base of the stakes.
Look at the last impeachment, that of President Bill Clinton in 1998. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr delivered his report on the Lewinsky affair to Congress on Sept. 9. The House voted to start impeachment proceedings on Oct. 8. The formal impeachment vote was Dec. 19. The matter then went to the Senate, which voted to acquit Clinton on Feb. 12, 1999. The process took a few days more than five months.
Imagine a similar timeline today. The House stays out on recess until the second week in September. Say they vote to begin proceedings in October. The impeachment vote comes in mid-to-late December, and the Senate verdict in February — probably somewhere between the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries.
That is a crazy scenario, and that is what would happen if impeachment work got under way immediately after the House returns from recess. If it were delayed further, the whole thing would move weeks or months farther down the road. Why not a Senate trial during Super Tuesday, or the summer political conventions? The possibilities are mind-boggling.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi fears impeachment will backfire on Democrats, in large part because the Republican-controlled Senate will never remove Donald Trump from office. Her strategy appears to be to delay and delay until at some point it becomes obvious to all that it is far too late to make impeachment happen. Pelosi will then look at her watch and say, “Oh, my goodness, look at the time!” And that will be that.
The fact is, it is nearly too late for impeachment right now. Yet the possibility of impeachment is still being discussed seriously.
While everyone was watching Robert Mueller ask when Matlock was on, the House, in coordination with the Trump Administration, passed a budget agreement that continues profligate spending as far as the eye can see (or at least two years), and which takes a government shutdown off the table until after the 2020 election. Not what I or any conservative activist would have done, but obviously President Trump feels he can continue to hold off the next cyclical recession long enough to get reelected. Kicking the can down the road has become a global pastime for almost all the nations of the world, and sooner or later there will come a reckoning. In America, this fight may have been lost when Bush41 let Gramm-Rudman-Hollings get whacked in 1990…
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at this story of Washington, D.C. therapists whose patients’ Trump Derangement Syndromes are making their equally liberal TDS-suffering therapists depressed as well. (Hat tip: Kurt Schlichter.)
Dr. Drew told Adams that he had predicted the recent typhus outbreak in Los Angeles, which was carried by rats, transferred by fleas to pets, and from pets to humans.
Bubonic plague, Dr. Drew said, like typhus, is endemic to the region, and can spread to humans from rodents in a similar fashion.
Though commonly recognized as the medieval disease responsible for the Black Death in the fourteenth century, which killed one-third of the population of Europe, the last outbreak of bubonic plague in the U.S. was nearly a century ago, from 1924 to 1925 — also in Los Angeles. Only a “heroic effort” by doctors stopped it, Dr. Drew recalled, warning that conditions were perfect for another outbreak of the plague in the near future.
Los Angeles is one of the only cities in the country, Dr. Drew said, that has no rodent control plan. “And if you look at the pictures of Los Angeles, you will see that the homeless encampments are surrounded by dumps. People defecate there, they throw their trash there, and the rats just proliferate there.”
Representative Jerrold Nadler has served in Congress for 27 years, rising to become the chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee. He has become a boldface name in the age of President Trump, the linchpin of many Democrats’ hopes of impeachment.
Eliot Engel leads the Foreign Affairs Committee, after first being elected to the House in 1988. Carolyn Maloney was the first woman to represent her district when she was elected in 1992. Yvette Clarke, serving since 2007, has delivered some of the most consistently progressive votes in her party.
All four New York House members are facing primary challenges from multiple insurgent candidates.
Almost a year in advance of the June 2020 primary, more than a dozen Democrats in New York have declared their plans to run, forming one of the most contentious congressional fields in the country at this stage. They are targeting some of the country’s longest-serving or most powerful politicians — most as first-time or outsider candidates, and some in the same district.
The phenomenon is not unique: Progressives across the country are plotting primary battles, spurred on by the victories last year of figures such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as growing disenchantment with the Democratic Party’s old-guard wing. Early challengers have emerged in blue states including New Jersey and California.
Texas Democrats have their eyes on taking over Texas, and a newly released plan lays out how they aim to finally turn Texas blue.
In a presentation given to political donors and Austin lobbyists this week, Texas Democrats made their case for heavy political investment in the Lone Star State.
First, they compare Texas to Ohio, a traditional swing state that often receives a heavy influx of cash from national Democrat donors. Both states, the presentation states, voted 43 percent Democrat in the 2016 presidential election. But while Ohio’s trajectory is “successively worse in the last two presidential elections,” Texas Democrats point out that they had their best showing in 20 years. They also highlight demographic differences between Ohio and Texas that they believe make the task easier, such as the Texas’ overall younger and larger minority population.
Snip.
Democrats need not worry, they say, about retaining [12 Texas House seats they flipped], as they claim there is “too much GOP defense to go on offense” in order to take those seats back. Recently released campaign finance reports, however, show that many of the newly elected “Democrat Dozen” have an astoundingly small amount in their campaign accounts, depicting what could be an uphill battle for many of them should Republicans wage serious campaigns to take those seats back.
In addition to John Cornyn’s senate seat, Democrats are targeting six U.S. congressional seats.
On the same theme, this piece says those six districts are:
TX-10 — Mike McCaul
TX-21 — Chip Roy
TX-22 — Pete Olson
TX-23 — Will Hurd
TX-24 — Kenny Marchant
TX-31 — John Carter
Minnesota, the only state to vote against Ronald Reagan in 1984, is trending Republican.
For example, last month, Trump moved to expand a major copper and nickel mining operation, one of the largest remaining reserves in the world, that Barack Obama had refused to renew in his final weeks in office. Obama’s backpedaling on approving new mining leases was widely unpopular. While liberal environmental groups are still vocally protesting Trump’s decision, polls show that Minnesotans, especially in the five counties surrounding the project, strongly approve.
Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration has also found increasing favor. Minnesota is a major resettlement state for Muslim refugees, many of them from terror-prone Syria and Somalia. Some Somalis have also left Minnesota to join the Islamic State in east Africa. A November 2016 attack by a Somali American, who stabbed eight people in a shopping mall, has fueled support for Trump’s Muslim travel ban.
Minnesota’s up for grabs for another reason: Massive fallout from the resignation of Sen. Al Franken, a prominent liberal Democrat, over sexual assault allegations that have damaged the party’s standing with voters across the board. Add to this the growing controversy over newly elected in-state Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is widely viewed as anti-Semitic and extremist, and the Democrats are confronting a major crisis of credibility with Minnesota’s electorate.
Related: “According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control released on Thursday, people with inside, compromising knowledge of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s financial and political dealings are 843% more likely to commit suicide.”
The Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David Berger, wants to desilo the Corps and reintegrate it into the Navy’s overall structure. CDR Salamander thinks this is a good idea. Maybe. I haven’t followed recent strategic seapower debates much as of late. But it’s a devil-in-the-details move that could badly backfire if improperly implemented. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
I first set eyes on Boris Johnson in the autumn of 1983 when we went up to Oxford at the same time. I knew who he was since my uncle Christopher was an ex-boyfriend of his mother’s and he had told me to keep an eye out for him, but I still wasn’t prepared for the sight (and sound) of him at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union. This was the world famous debating society where ambitious undergraduates honed their public-speaking skills before embarking on careers in politics or journalism, and Boris was proposing the motion.
With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch about him. You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill. This same combination—a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power—was even more pronounced in his way of speaking.
He began to advance an argument in what sounded like a parody of the high style in British politics—theatrical, dramatic, self-serious—when—a few seconds in—he appeared to completely forget what he was about to say. He looked up, startled—Where am I?—and asked the packed chamber which side he was supposed to be on. “What’s the motion, anyway?” Before anyone could answer, a light bulb appeared above his head and he was off, this time in an even more orotund, florid manner. Yet within a few seconds he’d wrong-footed himself again, this time because it had suddenly occurred to him that there was an equally compelling argument for the opposite point of view. This endless flipping and flopping, in which he seemed to constantly surprise himself, went on for the next 15 minutes. The impression he gave was of someone who’d been plucked from his bed in the middle of the night and then plonked down at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union without the faintest idea of what he was supposed to be talking about.
I’d been to enough Union debates at this point to know just how mercilessly the crowd could punish those who came before them unprepared. That was particularly true of freshmen, who were expected to have mastered all the arcane procedural rules, some of them dating back to the Union’s founding in 1823. But Boris’s chaotic, scatter-brained approach had the opposite effect. The motion was deadly serious—“This House Would Reintroduce Capital Punishment”—yet almost everything that came out of his mouth provoked gales of laughter. This was no ordinary undergraduate proposing a motion, but a Music Hall veteran performing a well-rehearsed comic routine. His lack of preparedness seemed less like evidence of his own shortcomings as a debater and more a way of sending up all the other speakers, as well as the pomposity of the proceedings. You got the sense that he could easily have delivered a highly effective speech if he’d wanted to, but was too clever and sophisticated—and honest—to enter into such a silly charade. To do what the other debaters were doing, and pretend he believed what was coming out of his mouth, would have been patronising. Everyone else was taking the audience for fools, but not him. He was openly insincere and, in being so, somehow seemed more authentic than everyone else.
A long list of Johnson scandals that didn’t even remotely come close to derailing his ascent skipped.
Another quote that’s often dragged up by Boris’s enemies to discredit him is from a Conservative campaign speech in 2005: “Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.” In their minds, this is appallingly sexist, as well as environmentally suspect. But if Orwell is right about the enduring appeal of the “overwhelming vulgarity,” the “smuttiness,” the “ever-present obscenity,” of Britain’s seaside postcards you can see why constantly reminding people of Boris’s politically incorrect remarks won’t necessarily hurt his electoral chances. It just serves to embed him in the public imagination as a stock British character whom many people still feel an instinctive affection for: the lovable rogue, the man with the holiday in his eye. He’s the guy that tries to persuade the barman to serve one more round of drinks after time has been called, the 14-year-old who borrows his father’s Mercedes at two o’clock in the morning and takes it up to a 100mph on the motorway with his friends shrieking in the back. He’s Falstaff in Henry IV, Sid James in the Carry On films. He’s a Donald McGill postcard.
In case you’re unfamiliar with the reference, here’s an example:
Israel has reportedly flown a modified version of the F-35 to Iran and back, circling major cities and military bases and taking surveillance photographs without being detected by Iranian radar or intercepted by Russian missiles.
That is the story that has been circulating throughout the Middle East for the past year. No one is certain whether it is true, but it has begun to appear in Western sources, especially since Iran recently fired the head of its air force.
The Israeli version of the F-35, known as the “Adir,” is reportedly the first version of the American-made Joint Strike Fighter that has ever been deployed in combat. But it may have already had a bigger impact in a non-combat role.
That so many believe the story is a sign Iran is already regarded as the “weak horse” in the middle east. (Hat tip: Scott Adams on Twitter.)
Social justice warriors defy any and all pushback, calling it “transphobia.” They argue that gender is a social construct. It’s a theory in feminist sociology that states society and culture, not genetics, define whether one is male, female, or “other”.
While the argument about what constitutes “gender identity” and “gender expression” – other confusing facets of gender in contemporary society – remain up for debate, what isn’t up for debate is the fact that those born with male body parts and hormone levels have physical superiority over most biological females. It is settled science.
Speaking of tranny madness, this piece is about a woke and naive Harvard professor who let himself be taken to the cleaners by a “lesbian” divorced from a tranny who had a one-night stand with him and then proceeded to rob him blind because he was too stupid/woke to resist her.
Here’s a horrifying story about how San Luis Obispo police chief Deanna Cantrell losing her gun in a toilet stall led police to conduct a warrantless search of an innocent man’s house and seized his children for “neglect” because the house was dirty.
A rule published Monday bars migrants from seeking asylum in the United States if they’ve traveled through another country first.
Tens of thousands of migrant families from Central America travel through Mexico to the U.S. each month, many claiming asylum. The Trump administration claims families are taking advantage of legal loopholes it says allow migrants a free pass to the country while they wait out phony asylum requests.
The DOJ’s statement documents one particularly horrifying murder that some of the gang members are charged with where a rival gang member “was abducted, choked, and driven to a remote location in the Angeles National Forest” where he was “dismembered, and his body parts were thrown into a canyon after one of the defendants allegedly cut the heart out of the victim’s body.”
I didn’t initially buy into this business about how Trump’s often-unorthodox tweets and actions are part of a political 3D chess game he’s playing while the rest of the country is playing checkers.
But I do now.
I could go through a lengthy punchlist of examples of Trump statements and moves that prove the 3D chess theory, but that would dramatically overtake the space this column has to offer. Instead, let’s just talk about this weekend’s flare-up over the president’s Twitter outburst aimed at The Squad — the four idiot freshman Democrat congresswomen, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, who have spent their time as elected officials offering one inappropriate and stupid anti-American outburst after another.
Trump didn’t initially name any of the four. He didn’t talk about Omar or Ocasio-Cortez, and he didn’t talk about Ayana Pressley or Rashida Tlaib.
Instead he referred to “Progressive” Democratic congresswomen, and then noted that they “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 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 it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!”
This was decried by all the Usual Suspects as an abjectly racist statement, a response that Trump certainly anticipated and couldn’t care less about. Even some weak-kneed Republicans thrashed about in paroxysms of self-righteousness about how Trump could possibly be so bigoted and insensitive in calling out The Squad. After all, three of the four were born in this country!
But Omar wasn’t.
Omar is from Somalia. Omar is quite possibly here in this country after having committed immigration fraud. There has been a quite credible, perhaps even convincing, case made that Ilhan Omar married her biological brother in furtherance of that immigration fraud. And Ilhan Omar has not stopped making incendiary anti-American and pro-Muslim Brotherhood statements since she entered public life.
Absolutely everything Trump said in his tweets applies perfectly and without stipulation to Ilhan Omar.
The fact that he didn’t use her name meant that our political betters immediately assumed he was also talking about Pressley, Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez.
Which bothered Trump not one bit.
Paragraphs on the unpopularity of Omar and Ocasio Cortez with actual voters (which I covered here) snipped.
So what do you do if you want to ensure Omar and AOC poison those so-called moderate Democrats who won those swing House districts last year?
You force Pelosi into bed with them.
Which is precisely what Trump has done.
The Democrat leadership immediately, reflexively, lined up behind The Squad after an entire week of slapping them down. Al Green, a Democratic congressman from the slums of Houston, is now attempting to use Trump’s tweets as a fresh justification for impeachment, which is all Al Green does in Congress. There will be a House resolution condemning the president’s comments as racist, on which Pelosi has put her stamp of approval, and another seeking to formally censure Trump.
All of this is precisely what Trump wanted. And he proved it by doubling and then tripling down on his statements Monday, first unleashing a new set of tweets mostly quoting Lindsey Graham, who had partially rebuked the president for getting too personal about The Squad in his complaints, and then popping off in a Rose Garden press avail with comments directly eviscerating Omar in a way I can’t remember ever having seen a president do to a member of Congress. Which was glorious, by the way, and if you haven’t seen the video you owe it to yourself to watch it.
Don’t think for one second that Trump doesn’t absolutely love this fight. He is a pig in slop at this point. Trump will continue forcing Pelosi and her leadership team into bed with The Squad from here all the way to Election Day, and when he’s through he won’t just win reelection in a landslide but he’ll also take away every single one of those swing districts.
The four — AOC, Tlaib, Pressley, Omar — have no clout in the Democratic caucus. But because of the confrontations they have caused and the controversy they have created, they have a massive media following.
Paradoxically, their interests in winning cheers as the fighting arm of the Democratic Party coincide with the interests of Donald Trump. He entertains and energizes his base by answering in kind their attacks on him and by adopting incendiary rhetoric of his own. He is now assuming the old “America! Love it or Leave it!” stance in going after the four women as anti-American ingrates.
They, by calling Trump a criminal, racist and fascist for whom impeachment proceedings should have begun months ago, elate and energize the outraged left of their party.
Among the presidential candidates, some have begun to side with the four, with Bernie Sanders saying Pelosi has been “a little” too tough on them.
On “Meet the Press,” Bernie added: “You cannot ignore the young people of this country who are passionate about economic and racial and social and environmental justice. You’ve got to bring them in, not alienate them.”
Trump’s Sunday attack forced Pelosi to stand with her severest critics, and she re-elevated the race issue with this tweet: “When Trump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again.”
Do Democrats believe that refighting the racial battles of the 1960s that were thought to have been resolved is a winning hand in 2020?
Does Pelosi think that demeaning white America is going to rally white or minority Americans to Democratic banners?
(Caveat: Patrick Buchanan.)
Democrats tell Jake Tapper off the record that Trump snookered them into embracing The Squad. “And they have to pretend that their party is unified because of their fear of being challenged in primaries by radicals with the support of Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s Svengali chief of staff and the brains behind the Justice Democrats.”
Chakrabarti’s previous HQ was a Knoxville address out of which the Justice Democrats and another PAC operated side by side with a dozen congressional campaign committees. This arrangement flouted a variety of campaign finance laws and prompted several Federal Election Commission complaints, including one alleging that Chakrabarti set up a $1 million slush fund. But this sort of skullduggery is standard practice among Democrats. What exacerbated the already tense atmosphere in their House caucus was Chakrabarti’s response to the $4.6 billion border aid package passed by Congress last month. On June 27, he took to Twitter and berated the Democratic leadership for its shortcomings:
As usual, Dem leadership tried to create a pre-watered down border bill because of a mistaken idea that it’s more “viable.” And they lost to McConnell anyway. This is the entire theory of change that never works. Why not start from your strongest negotiating stance?
Predictably, this presumptuous tweet drew a number of angry responses from various Democrats who had voted for the measure, whereupon Chakrabarti once again betook himself to Twitter and proceeded to accuse his critics of racism:
Instead of “fiscally conservative but socially liberal,” let’s call the New Democrats and Blue Dog Caucus the “New Southern Democrats.” They certainly seem hell bent to do to black and brown people today what the old Southern Democrats did in the 40s.
Chakrabarti later deleted that tweet, but not before it had clearly signaled who actually calls the shots in AOC’s office.
Snip.
Chakrabarti’s Justice Democrats PAC is also taking fire from the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). The Hill reports, “Congressional Black Caucus members are furious at Justice Democrats, accusing the outside progressive group … of trying to oust lawmakers of color, specifically African American lawmakers.” The PAC evidently plans to primary at least six CBC members who occupy safe Democratic seats simply because they don’t lean far enough to the left. Chakrabarti is clearly using his position as AOC’s chief of staff to engineer a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party. He said as much during an extensive profile for The Washington Post Magazine:
To me, there wasn’t a difference between working for her and working for the movement … The whole theory of change for the current Democratic Party is that to win this country we need to tack to the hypothetical middle … you don’t take unnecessary risks, which translates to: You don’t really do anything.
Chakrabarti doesn’t see himself as a mere staffer in some congresswoman’s office. He sees AOC as someone who provides him with a headquarters from which he can “fundamentally change” the Democratic Party.
Speaking of The Squad, The Minneapolis Star Tribuneactually reports on allegations against Omar: “New investigative documents released by a state agency have given fresh life to lingering questions about the marital history of Rep. Ilhan Omar and whether she once married a man — possibly her own brother — to skirt immigration laws.”
Powerline, which has been following the story the media wouldn’t, has still more:
In 1995, Ilhan entered the United States as a fraudulent member of the “Omar” family.
That is not her family. The Omar family is a second, unrelated family which was being granted asylum by the United States. The Omars allowed Ilhan, her genetic sister Sahra, and her genetic father Nur Said to use false names to apply for asylum as members of the Omar family.
Ilhan’s genetic family split up at this time. The above three received asylum in the United States, while Ilhan’s three other siblings — using their real names — managed to get asylum in the United Kingdom.
Ilhan Abdullahi Omar’s name, before applying for asylum, was Ilhan Nur Said Elmi.
Her father’s name before applying for asylum was Nur Said Elmi Mohamed. Her sister Sahra Noor’s name before applying for asylum was Sahra Nur Said Elmi. Her three siblings who were granted asylum by the United Kingdom are Leila Nur Said Elmi, Mohamed Nur Said Elmi, and Ahmed Nur Said Elmi.
Ilhan and Ahmed married in 2009, presumably to benefit in some way from a fraudulent marriage. They did not divorce until 2017.
Democrats have defined racism down yet again. “Thirty-two percent (32%) of Democrats, however, say it’s racist for any white politician to criticize the political views of a politician of color. So being a ‘politician of color’ means that your views are immune to disagreement. Unless–once again–you are a Republican.”
The point is, apparently, Democrats are sick of thinking about that guy, the “guy in a diner in rural” whatever. Once they were safely stowed in a basket — a basket of deplorables — and that worked out so disastrously that the reaction could be to obsess over these imaginary people. Are Democratic Party candidates expected to actually venture into the hinterlands? No, they’ll just worry about those people, and then they come to Madison (where I live) or Milwaukee to try to score enough votes to outnumber those diner people. That’s what Democrats do to win Wisconsin.
Planned Parenthood head ousted over refusal to back transsexual abortions. Tranny madness is going to take out the entire leftwing establishment by insisting that every member must forthrightly declare that 2+2=5.
The Amazon pullout of Seattle continues. The corporate giant announced on Tuesday that it is going to build a 43-story tower in Bellevue.
It will be Amazon’s tallest building anywhere in the world, and it will be the tallest building in Bellevue, which has more than a few skyscrapers. Several thousand employees will be able to work there. So it looks like this is another part in the saga of Amazon leaving Seattle. All of this is because we have a city council and a mayor who have gone fanatic about socialism. They keep pushing anti-business policies.
What this means for the downtown Seattle real estate market is that when the economy inevitably starts to turn, it will be cataclysmic. When you have one company that takes up so many thousands of square feet of downtown real estate, and that company moves out, real estate prices will fall.
I don’t know when this is going to happen, but I am very confident in my analysis; Seattle will fall harder than any other city in the country. This is because Seattle has been the craziest in its Leftist run-up during this boom economy that we’re enjoying right now.
We already have so many businesses on the brink of survival because of the minimum wage because of all of the controlling policies the city government keeps imposing. When the businesses start toppling, you’re going to see all the support industry in downtown Seattle — the food service, etc. — fall hard, too.
The Amazon pullout of Seattle is another dramatic sign that when the people who drive our economy, our tax revenue, our job creation are out because of our politics, it’s time to change our politics.
In addition to his sexual predation with “tweens and teens,” Epstein pursued ambitious, beautiful New York City women in their 20s in the early 2000s, some of them ex-models seeking a professional afterlife. To this woman, and others, Epstein introduced himself as the owner of a hedge fund with clients investing $1 billion or more. He kept his child molestation secret, and came off as a gentle, erudite recluse. He was often at movie premieres, sometimes with a blonde on each arm—a blonde of legal age, but still, as noted this week by David Boies, usually under 25 years old. His predation had not been reported to the police yet, but there were indications that he was somewhat different than most mature men his age. Eleanora Kennedy, the elegant wife of powerhouse lawyer Michael Kennedy, recalls asking Epstein to underwrite a premiere party at the Metropolitan Club for The White Countess, a Merchant Ivory film released in 2005. “I got him on the phone and explained that the event was also a benefit for a women’s medical center conducting a study about menopause,” says Kennedy. “As soon as I said ‘menopause,’ he said, ‘Ms. Kennedy, if you don’t say that word again, I’ll send you a check for $10,000.’”
Like most of the older men who date young women, Epstein seemed to take great pride in his behavior. He seemed to desperately want other important men to perceive him as a great lothario, Genghis Khan in a monogrammed sweatshirt. A former model who was on Epstein’s 727 shortly after she graduated college recalls him taking her and some older men on a tour to show off his custom-designed, padded floors. “When I saw that I thought, Wow, rich people are weird,” she says. “I was so stupid and naïve—Why are padded floors cool? I was too young to get it.” The men simply laughed and winked, joking with each other that Epstein padded his floors so that he could have sex on the floor at 10,000 feet.
Also: He liked to keep his bedroom at 54°F when slept.
Media unveils bombshell report of Trump hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein…in 1992.
Yes, that’d be 27 years ago, before Epstein was even known to have done anything illicit. So apparently, Trump is guilty by association because he couldn’t see into the future and know that Epstein would abuse women some years later. In fact, Epstein did not even own his “pedophile island” in 1992, nor are there currently any victims dating back to that time.
The sexual assault charges against Kevin Spacey have been dismissed. The case, which involved Spacey allegedly groping an 18-year old man, evidently had multiple problems and fell apart when the accuser refused to testify. This is the only one of some fifteen accusers (one as young as 14) who alleged Spacey did something sleazy with them.
Related: CNN reporter asks a panel of women to comment on President Trump’s “racist” tweets. Their reply: “It’s not racist.” Including a legal immigrant.
None of these women, including a legal immigrant, think the president's comments were racist.
“Billionaire investor Peter Thiel says one reason for Google aiding in the transfer of AI technology to the Chinese military in favor of America is that “woke” Google employees are anti-American and prefer China to the U.S.”
In addition to being a corrupt scumbag, the Governor of Puerto Rico is also a bit of an asshole. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Today’s stupid ecoscam headline: “Streaming Online Pornography Produces as Much CO2 as Belgium.” From the comments: “If we had a global referendum on whether we’d rather have porn or Belgium, I wouldn’t bet on Belgium.”
#TeamCocaineMitch is already throwing down on Democratic opponent Amy McGrath:
Wes Pruden, editor of the Washington Times, RIP. I like the cut of his jib:
He was the last of the old-time newspapermen, and the word “journalist” was prohibited from appearing in the pages of the Times during his tenure as editor-in-chief.
That rule was one of several variations from the AP Stylebook known as “Prudenisms,” reflecting Mr. Pruden’s preference for plain English and his hostility to euphemism, jargon and lazy writing. For example, “controversial” was prohibited, as were “alleged,” “allegation” and “allegedly.” If someone was accused of wrongdoing, then you had to cite a source making that charge, rather than just saying the person allegedly did whatever it was. Also, under Mr. Pruden’s rules, “gay” was not an acceptable synonym for homosexual, which meant that, as an assistant editor on the national desk, I had to change this in AP wire stories.
The Times used courtesy titles, so the President would be “Mr. Trump” and the Speaker of the House “Mrs. Pelosi” on second reference, and we were not allowed to use “Ms.,” so that on second reference a certain New York Democrat would be Miss Ocasio-Cortez. Also, we did not use “Dr.” as the honorific for a Ph.D., but only for an M.D. This was because doctorate degrees were a dime a dozen in D.C., and even many high-school principals could demand a “Dr.” if we ever let that get started. This particular Prudenism really ruffled the feathers of James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who had a Ph.D. in psychology and always insisted on being called Doctor Dobson, but the editor’s rule was unbending and on second reference he was always “Mr. Dobson.” I seem to recall Ralph Z. Hallow on the phone with Dobson’s people, getting an earful of complaints about this, as the “Doctor” thing was part of Dobson’s brand, as it were, but it was Mr. Pruden’s paper, and complaints were useless.
Some of my colleagues at the paper grumbled about Mr. Pruden’s curmudgeonly ways, but having an old-fashioned editor was in many ways a great blessing, because he was utterly invulnerable to any kind of political correctness or manufactured “controversy.” Of course, every liberal on the planet hated the Washington Times, so there was never any shortage of “activist” types indignant about our coverage, but there was no pressure they could bring to bear on Mr. Pruden that would make him flinch. A reporter whose story touched off a firestorm of outrage knew that, as long as he had the facts right, Mr. Pruden had his back. As long as the Old Man was happy with your work, it didn’t matter who else might be angry about it. He had courage, and a sense of honor.
Bird, an electric scooter sharing startup, lost $100 million over three months. On behalf of every Austinite who’s driven downtown recently, I’d just like to say:
A reminder from 50 years ago: Don’t drink and drive. And if you do, don’t leave the scene of the crash to flee. Especially if there was another passenger in the car. Especially if it’s underwater…
"We are doing a film of the musical 'cats'" "Why" "Shut up" "Are they going to look like cats or humans?" "Fuck you" "Are you ok?" "Cats with avatar human faces" "Why" "Fuck you" pic.twitter.com/dm3ooobmMt
They described an America of 2019 that was downright dystopic.
Elizabeth Warren said the economy was only “doing great for a thinner and thinner slice at the top” and that the government “is corrupt.” Cory Booker declared, “I see every single day that this economy is not working for average Americans” and lamented that “Dignity is being stripped from labor” and that “This is actually an economy that’s hurting small businesses and not allowing them to compete.” Bill de Blasio argued, “There’s plenty of money in this country. It’s just in the wrong hands. Democrats have to fix that.” Amy Klobuchar described “so many people that are having trouble affording college and having trouble affording their premiums.” (I thought Obamacare was supposed to fix that!) Tim Ryan lamented, “We’re getting drones shot down for $130 million, because the president is distracted.”
Despite President Trump canceling a military retaliation against Iran at the last minute, Tulsi Gabbard warned, “Donald Trump and his cabinet, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and others — are creating a situation that just a spark would light off a war with Iran, which is incredibly dangerous.” (Notice she blames Trump and his cabinet for creating the situation, not the Iranians.)
This occurs as the national unemployment rate has been at or below four percent since March 2018, and hit the lowest rate since 1969. Even half of Democrats rate the economy as “good” or “excellent.” No doubt the people most likely to watch two hours of ten Democratic candidates debating are the most partisan, and probably the ones most likely to insist that because Donald Trump is president, the economy simply cannot be doing well. But one has to wonder how well the message “I will save you from this terrible economy” will work in a general election.
A lot of fun was had at Beto O’Rourke’s Spanish language Hispandering:
Beto and Julian trying to out-Spanish each other is more low energy than Jeb.
— The Red-Headed Libertarian (@TRHLofficial) June 27, 2019
#DemDebate: Moderator: "Illegal aliens!" Cory: "I will hug them while crying" Warren: "OPEN BORDERS!" Gabby: "Replace all citizens with illegals!" Klobuchar: "beat them. then amnesty." Beto: "Me gustan los tacos!" DeBlasio: "Illegal aliens are made of peeeeple!"
— ¡El Sooopèrr! ن c137 (@SooperMexican) June 27, 2019
Warren and de Blasio went Full Socialized Medicine:
Elizabeth Warren leaves no doubt: She's 'with Bernie' on kicking 180 million people off of private insurancehttps://t.co/se8ArcD1ub#DemDebate
William Jacobson at Legal insurrection thought John Delaney won the debate by not sounding insane.
The moderators clearly favored Elizabeth Warren, repeatedly going back to her for questions, particularly at the beginning.
You had Warren’s tough gal act, Beto’s wandering mind and Spanish language lesson plan, Bill de Blasio’s almost full-blown commie schtick, Spartacus, and Amy Klobuchar’s Minnesota nice routine.
Who won?
Let’s focus on the purpose of an early debate — for all but the top few candidates, it’s name recognition and not coming across as a marginal freak. Tulsi Gabbard achieved a little of that, but far and away the voice of sanity was someone I never had heard of.
He spoke about how Medicare for all, which depends on reimbursement rates so low it would bankrupt most hospitals, was not viable. That goes against the grain of the Democratic Party, where most of the leading candidates have jumped on some version of Bernie’s plan….
Being the “not completely crazy” Democrat could get Delaney media attention.
Don’t bet on it. Besides, there’s that tiny physical similarity problem:
We just had an actual candidate at a Presidential debate talk all tough about how hard he'll fight for reproductive justice so that [checks card] trangender men who say they are women and who can't get pregnant can have abortions!
"We have a perception problem in the Democrat Party," Ryan admitted. "We have got to change the center of gravity from being coastal, elitist and Ivy League to a party that is on the side of workers. If we don't focus on workers, none of this change will happen."
He insisted that Democrats will not win unless they "address that fundamental problem."
Ryan is correct, but that "perception problem" is rooted in the Democratic Party's increasing radicalism on issues such as abortion, climate change, intersectionality, and more.
It's amazing that Elizabeth Warren is 70... she doesn't look a day older than privileged rich white woman who impersonated another race to advance her career and get cushy jobs where she never really had to work. #DemocraticDebate#DemDebate
Still triggered by the question about the alleged gender pay gap injustice. Give it up, fellow Democrats. It’s a distortion based on bogus, agenda-driven studies. Women will be helped by truth and honest research—not hype and twisted studies. #DemDebate#DebateNight 👇 https://t.co/CCOWzeMunn
— Marianne Williamson (@marwilliamson) June 27, 2019
Finally, YouTube appears to have banned a number of YouTubers just for livestreaming their commentary about the debates:
hello @TeamYouTube i was commentating on the debates like literally every human being on the internet and now i can’t stream for 90 days? can you help with this please? get ya boy marco on the line. pic.twitter.com/9JukdQirkq
The lineup for the first two debates are set, Warren pulls ahead of Sanders for second place in early states, Castro and Klobuchar can’t even crack the top three in their own states, and Gabbard’s childhood in a white surfer dude’s Hari Krishna cult. It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
For those who missed Saturday’s post, the DNC debates are set, with Warren, O’Rourke, Booker, Klobucher, Castro, Ryan, Gabbard, Inslee, de Blasio and Delaney debating June 26, while Biden, Sanders, Harris, Buttigieg, Yang, Gillibrand, Hickenlooper, Bennet, Williamson and Swalwell are going at it June 27. Bullock, Moulton, Gravel and Messam are left out in the cold.
Polls
UT/Texas Tribune (Texas primary): Biden 23, O’Rourke 15, Warren 14, Sanders 12, Buttigieg 8, Harris 5, Castro 3, Gabbard 3, Booker 1, Delaney 1, Gillibrand 1, Inslee 1, Klobucher 1, Swalwell 1. Castro trying Gabbard for 7th in his home state is a pretty clear sign he’s going nowhere.
Former Representative Beto O’Rourke’s campaign rented a taco truck and dished out free chorizo. Senator Amy Klobuchar’s gang rattled little white bells. Former Representative John Delaney’s team had a bagpiper and a mini blimp overhead. Some of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s supporters wore bright feather boas, with a few women dancing up and down the street playing Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” on a portable speaker. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg hosted a barbecue at a park and played keys with a local band while wearing sunglasses. Senator Bernie Sanders marched from a McDonald’s alongside striking workers and activists.
Interviews with more than a dozen strategists and organizers revealed rising alarm at the lack of attention being paid to Latinos in swing states where they could decide the outcome of the Democratic primary and the general election. Trump is counting on a slice of the Latino electorate to back him, announcing aggressive outreach plans to keep states like Florida in his column.
But if Democrats fail to counter those efforts — by energizing younger Latinos and reaching members of the community who feel estranged by the president — those voters may simply sit out the election.
I get the impression that Democrats feel their illegal alien Hispandering is all the outreach they need to Hispanic American citizens. I suspect they’re wrong.
Castro was the first Democratic hopeful to issue an immigration plan and has visited Nevada the most, but his inability to eclipse low-single-digits has troubled activists. Elizabeth Warren has placed nearly 30 staffers in Nevada and is working to hire Latino interns and to set up caucus trainings in Latino communities. Cory Booker is doing Latino outreach through social media as well as digital and TV, notably appearing on the Univision show “Despierta America” the day he announced.
Harris, whose campaign declined to say how many people it has in Nevada, has prioritized hiring Spanish-speaking organizing staff in the state and rolled out a paid fellowship program. She caught the attention of activists for providing headphones with real-time Spanish translation at an early Nevada town hall. Pete Buttigieg has no staffers on the ground, but his constituency director is Latino, and the campaign plans to hire a person dedicated to outreach to the Latino community.
Front-runner Joe Biden has just four people in Nevada and has visited the state once. His campaign website, however, does provide a full Spanish translation. Some of the Latino operatives said they’re eager to see whether he tailors his speeches more to the experiences of black and Latino populations, in addition to white working-class voters.
“What I have seen from Joe Biden is that he is running a campaign reminiscent of 1992 or 1993, the courting of the suburban white voter,” Salgado said.
Isabel Aldunate, a Biden campaign spokeswoman, said: “Vice President Biden committed from Day One that Latinos will have a voice at the highest level of this campaign.”
Sanders’ campaign would not disclose how many organizers it has in Nevada, but an adviser said its field staff would grow exponentially in the coming weeks. His pending immigration plan is being co-written by three undocumented immigrants and the campaign is collaborating with activist organizations on it. Ten percent of Sanders’ staff at its national headquarters are Dreamers or immigrants, according to the campaign.
“It’s the backbone of this campaign to reach out to Latinos and immigrants and disenfranchised communities of all color,” said Chuck Rocha, a top adviser to Sanders.
But the lack of an immigration plan from all but three Democrats — Castro, O’Rourke and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee — is a troubling indicator, the Latino operatives said. Trump has made clear that he intends to run on an anti-immigration platform again, and Democrats have yet to show they’ll have an effective response.
And by “anti-immigration” they, of course, mean “anti-illegal alien.”
With millions of dollars on the line, top New York donors are already beginning to pick favorites, and three candidates are generating most of the buzz: former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Senator Kamala Harris of California and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.
It is, at first blush, an unusual grouping, considering that the mayor of New York City (Bill de Blasio), the state’s junior senator (Kirsten Gillibrand) and a neighboring senator with deep ties to New York’s elite (Cory Booker of New Jersey) are all in the race and vying for their money.
Interviews with two dozen top contributors, fund-raisers and political advisers on Wall Street and beyond revealed that while many are still hedging their bets, those who care most about picking a winner are gravitating toward Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, while donors are swooning over Mr. Buttigieg enough to open their wallets and bundling networks for him. These dynamics raise the prospect of growing financial advantages for some candidates and closed doors for others.
“There is going to be a real income inequality,” Steven Rattner, a Wall Street executive and Democratic donor, said of the coming fund-raising results for the second quarter, which covers April through June. “You are going to see a big separation between the rich and the poor.”
There are now 24 declared candidates seeking to cashier President Trump — almost enough for a full Major League Baseball roster—and the flimsy standards the party set to get a slot on stage will be met by almost all of them. Instead of substantive debates between the leading candidates, the party is going to get a chorus line of never-gonna-be-presidents yapping at each other for two hours.
Most of these people have no chance of becoming the nominee. They know it. The Democratic National Committee knows it. And the top tier candidates know it too. The debates should be structured as such, rather than like cattle-call auditions for The Voice.
It is understandable, after the unity-destroying trainwreck of the 2016 primary, that the DNC didn’t want to appear to be needlessly excluding particular candidates so early in the process. But their rules for making the first two rounds of debates in June and July — 65,000 individual donations with 200 or more donors from each of at least 20 states, or hitting 1 percent or higher in three or more qualifying polls — turned out to be Maginot Line inadequate. With the increasing ease of dropping a few bucks into a campaign and the 24/7 attention already given to the 2020 election, it was inevitable that basically anyone with even the slightest national profile or resources could meet one of these two bars.
“A new poll from the Black Economic Alliance of 1,003 black Americans found that between 27% and 33% of those surveyed “have reservations” about or are “very uncomfortable” with Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Pete Buttigieg as presidential candidates.” That’s a weird way to phrase things, as Sanders (31%) and Harris (27%) fall into the same range.
Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Maybe?Still dithering. Says Hollywood should “stay and fight” in Georgia rather than boycott it over abortion. Pandering to local interests rather than the hard left base? That’s sort of a sign…
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Yahoo finance interview and plugs a new book. Instead of telling you the title, I’d suggest checking the Barnes & Noble remainder table six months from now. “Bennet would rescind some of the Republican tax cuts from 2017, and spend more on education and infrastructure.” Of course he would. Bennet gets an attack ad from conservative Americans for Prosperity over corporate welfare, mainly to soften him up for the 2022 senate race, since his presidential campaign is going nowhere.
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. He promises to cure cancer; if Trump had said that in 2015 they’d still be crucifying him. The Washington Post puts up yet another “stop talking about electability and Joe Biden” piece, because we just haven’t had enough of those. It even quotes Amanda Marcotte, author of another piece on the same thing, because now even recycled garbage gets to be recycled again. “What “The West Wing” reveals about Joe Biden.” No, really, that’s a real CNN headline, and not an Onion or Babylon Bee parody. Polifact rates Biden’s statement that China has increased theft of U.S. technology under Trump as mostly true, but I would guess that it’s only they’ve been caught a lot more.
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Why you shouldn’t count Cory Booker out of the 2020 presidential race.” Why? “His steady strategy of hiring prominent political operatives and building powerful grassroots organizations in early voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire could pay off big time months from now.” Maybe, maybe not, It’s not like the other candidates aren’t doing a lot of hiring in Iowa as well. Also this: “‘His team is playing the long game,’ added Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina Democratic consultant. ‘The worst thing you can do in a race like this is peak too soon.'” No, the worst you can do is fail to make any impression whatsoever. Gets a CNBC interview. “Of all the Democratic presidential candidates, none delivers a speech any better than Cory Booker.” Color me skeptical. “Cory Booker can blame his campaign’s irrelevancy on his school choice flip-flop.” Eh, probably not, though standing firm might have garnered him a little more black support in polls. But “It’s easy to see why Booker’s campaign hasn’t lifted off yet: He’s utterly unremarkable and has no real constituency among the Democratic base” is dead on…
Montana Governor Steve Bullock: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Gov. Bullock demands entry into first DNC debate.” People in Hell want ice-water, too. Gets a New York interview that’s mostly about being excluded. It’s like the coach of 20-18 college basketball team complaining that they really should have been included in the NIT…
Is it true that you speak Norwegian?
Ja, I am evasive in seven different languages.
How do you plan to tackle income inequality?
If I may, I’d like to speak to that very specific issue with a few glittering generalities.
Go on.
Freedom. Democracy. Bridges.
Care to elaborate?
Optimism. Honesty. A child’s lemonade stand.
You have my vote.
I know. If this piece were any fluffier, it’d have a thread count.
“Mayor Pete’s Foreign Policy: One Good Idea and Lots of Bad Ones. The good one is congress stepping up to its constitutional duty on war and piece. The bad ones are all leftwing boilerplate or vague generalities. He also says that the United States has had gay presidents before. The technical term for this theory is “talking out your ass.”
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: In. Twitter. Facebook. He had a Fox townhall, which starts by him ignoring and deflecting a question about the Steele dossier. Has a plan to eliminate lead poisoning, which I’m sure will draw fire from those numerous pro-lead poisoning lobbyists.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: In. Twitter. Facebook. Got to be honest: I didn’t even expect him to make the debate stage, so his campaign has already exceeded my exceedingly low expectations. “New York Mayor Bill de Blasio takes his low popularity to the national stage.” “Bill de Blasio’s constituents appear to waver from being amused to appalled by his White House bid. Some of his past confidants have signaled they might sooner enlist with the LaRouche movement than take a job on his campaign.” More: “De Blasio shows every sign of suffering from a curse that has afflicted most every New York mayor who has aspired to higher office since 1868. The city’s tabloids are littered with the political carcasses of mayors whose aspirations were crushed as soon as they tried to set foot outside the city.” Also:
It doesn’t help that De Blasio has a penchant for self-inflicted wounds. He’s so loathed by New York’s police union that when he visited South Carolina, the union’s president warned the sister organization down South that De Blasio would be “an unmitigated disaster… for any American who wants a functioning government.” A pre-campaign launch event at Trump Tower went sideways when protesters — and the operator of the building’s sound system — outwitted the mayor and the media dismissed the effort as opportunistic and incompetent.
De Blasio’s actual launch was spoiled when invitations went out for an event in Iowa that listed him as already in the race, albeit with his name spelled wrong (something that happens a lot to the mayor).
Inside, de Blasio receives an endorsement, his first, from the Orangeburg mayor and lays out his case for why he, the 24th Democrat and sixth* white straight man in a row to declare a run for president, deserves their vote, having brought paid sick leave, higher wages, and universal prekindergarten to New York. “And when we put forward a nominee who has actually done things for working people,” he says, “working people are going to believe again!” He gets the kind of enthusiastic reception you’d never see at home, where he remains dogged by questions big and small: from violating ethics rules at his nonprofit; to his gym routine; to missing a 9/11 memorial commemoration; to rooting for the Red Sox; to his absence from City Hall; to the way he eats pizza.
Afterward, in the church basement, the mayor holds a press conference with just three reporters present; an aide pointedly ignores the one from New York to call on one with the Times and Democrat, a 7,000-circulation local newspaper, who asks the mayor to expound on the virtues of visiting South Carolina.
De Blasio would avoid the city press corps entirely if he could. The relations between them are way past repair, with reporters in New York finding him self-righteous, smug, with an inflated sense of his own importance, and he finding them in thrall to their corporate masters, in search of political gossip and cheap jokes about groundhogs.
But the derision the city’s press has for de Blasio has seeped upward into the wider culture. “De Blasio PAC Spends $30 Million on Ads Urging Candidate Not to Embarrass Self by Running,” read a recent headline in The Onion. After noting that the mayor was polling at zero percent in New Hampshire, Stephen Colbert cracked, “He has nowhere to go but home.” Even Lloyd Blankfein piled on, tweeting, “On the bright side, if DeB gets elected prez, we New Yorkers will lose his undivided attention a year ahead of schedule.”
“I look forward to laying out how my health care plan – ‘BetterCare’ – is both superior health care policy, and a much smarter way forward, than Senator Sanders plan, Medicare for All,” Delaney wrote on Friday.
Delaney had a similar message for the California Democratic Party’s convention earlier this month. He’s all for universal health care, he assured his audience, but Medicare for All is the wrong way to achieve it. It’s just “not good politics,” he said. He was booed and an unimpressed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who had heard enough of his moderate takes, asked him to “sashay away” from the race.
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Gets a Polifact profile that contains little new. She gets a Wall Street Journal profile (alternate source). She “staunchly” opposes impeachment and decries identity politics, both of which make her stand out in this crowd. Says she’s getting a boost from the Rogan interviews. But the most notable news is a long, interesting piece on her childhood as part of (to quote the piece) the “alt-right of the Hare Krishna movement.”
When FiveThirtyEight asked 60 Democratic Party activists whom they didn’t want to win, Tulsi Gabbard came in first out of 17 candidates, a poll she used to rile up her own intensely motivated supporters, who tend to identify, proudly, as anti-Establishment outsiders. In May, Joe Rogan, whose podcast is listened to millions of times each month by MMA fans, stoner bros, and self-styled freethinkers, chose his candidate. “Tulsi Gabbard’s my girl,” he said. “I’m voting for her. I decided. I like her. I met her in person. Fuck it.”
Snip. About the white “surfer dude” guru her parents followed:
In 1970, the Honolulu Advertiser published a piece called “One Man Rules Haiku Krishnaites,” with the subhead “Absolute power of devotees.” In the photo beside the piece, [cult leader Chris] Butler is seated shirtless and smoking, hair skimming his shoulders and a sarong around his waist, staring alluringly into the distance, a mischievous smile on his face. It is the expression of less a guru than a playboy, and this is how Advertiser reporter Janice Wolf depicts him, a handsome dictator with the ability to hypnotize the two dozen 18-to-22-year-olds who live with him in his Quonset hut. One of the girls, an 18-year-old who also happened to have the Sanskrit name Tulsi, says he arranged her marriage to another member of the group. She and another girl, who say they would kill for him, describe his teachings. Among them: “Flowers scream when they’re picked. So do trees when they’re trimmed.” (“Tulsi and Boni were sitting on the lawn chewing blades of grass when they said this,” notes Wolf.)
Butler taught vegetarianism, sexual conservatism, mind-body dualism, and disinterest in the material world. He taught a virulent homophobia, skepticism of science, and the dangers of public schools. He had been associated with Hare Krishna, and in fact claimed to have been given his Sanskrit name, Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, by the founder of the Hare Krishna movement, but by the time he encountered the Gabbards, he’d started his own group. His teachings revolved around worship of Krishna but differed from those of Hare Krishna, in that he instructed his followers to learn from only a single guru — himself — and did not require them to shave their heads or wear robes. The lack of formal dress allowed the group an anonymity he encouraged. He forbade them from visiting India, which is not typical of Hare Krishna, and, also against Hare Krishna practice, married. His wife was one of his followers, Wai Lana, a popular yoga instructor who later had a long-running instructional yoga series on public television. (Abraham, Tulsi’s husband, has helped with filming Wai Lana’s videos; his mother also works for her.) Whenever Butler traveled, he’d have the homes he stayed in lined with tinfoil, to protect against electromagnetic radiation.
Snip.
It was the 1980s. Greg says he and Tulsi attended these gatherings together, and years later, when Abraham was born, he’d see him too. (Tulsi says that she did not attend gatherings like these.) Waiting four or five or six hours for Siddhaswarupananda’s entrance built a kind of thrilling pressure, and Greg remembers Sundays as “incredibly theatrical.” Devotees with radios would place themselves at various high points along the beach, operating as a security force. “You’re waiting hours and hours for this dude to show up, and then when he does, people go absolutely wild — it’s all your family and all your friends singing and dancing and chanting, you’re so excited,” says Greg. The guru would then address the crowd. He was good with the pregnant pause. He had the kind of easy confidence you’d expect from Krishna’s representative on Earth. He was also vulgar and vindictive. “He would start excoriating people for fucking up. Sound systems not working, cups of water not being cleaned, people dressed funny, driving poorly. He would publicly mock people. And when he would do that — that’s a form of Krishna’s mercy.” Everyone I spoke to who was raised in the group described, as children, hearing Butler call men “faggots” and women “cunts.” One time in Malibu, Greg recalls, Butler had passed a man on the beach in a thong on his way to the gathering; Butler then described in graphic detail what that man allegedly wanted his “boyfriend” to do to him. “That’s vivid as a kid,” says Greg, whose name is not really Greg; he does not want to be cut off from his family.
Back in the ’70s, Butler went by the name “Sai Young,” a name he possibly picked because he was a gifted baseball player who had hoped to go pro. In their boyhood, according to his estranged brother Kurt, Chris was the handsome, popular one. Their father, a family physician named Willis Butler, took them, their mother, and their siblings to protest Vietnam well before it was socially acceptable to do so. Kurt remembers the whole family standing along a sidewalk on the edge of the University of Hawaii campus, holding signs that read stop the war and stop the bombing. From their cars, people threw garbage at the family. They yelled things: “Losers,” “Love it or leave it,” “Fucking commies.”
Their father was, in fact, a communist. The Butler patriarch loved the Soviet Union, thought North Korea a workers’ paradise. When Kurt brought home a geography book from school that mentioned political repression in the USSR, his father called it “lying propaganda.” When, as an adolescent, Chris pointed out that the Viet Cong had committed atrocities, his father wouldn’t hear it. Chris sought refuge in psychedelics, Kurt wrote in an email to me, then in meditation. He began writing poetry. He began giving meditation classes. “The classes,” says Kurt, “gradually evolved into a full-fledged cult.”
It’s so frigging weird you really need to read the whole thing, but it’s peripheral enough to the 2020 campaign that I don’t want to excerpt any more here. But it does give the impression of a woman who had no strong political commitments outside of the cult she grew up in until she joined the army…which was two years after her first election as a state representative.
This isn’t going well for Gillibrand. She has failed at some basics. For someone who’s always been a voracious fundraiser, she raised just $3 million in the first quarter of the year, less than half of what South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg raised. And she was weeks behind the self-help author Marianne Williamson and the automation alarmist Andrew Yang in getting the 65,000 donors needed to guarantee her a spot on the Democratic debate stage later this month. (Her campaign announced she finally passed that mark last weekend.)
Gillibrand is a United States senator from New York, and this is the best she can do.
She also compared pro-life supporters to racists.
Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Senate candidate Andrew Gillum: Probably not. He’s raising money for Democrats in Florida, but a lot of it is going to travel expenses. Unless something happens, I’m going to move him down to the “Out of the Running” list next week.
California Senator Kamala Harris: In. Twitter. Facebook. “Kamala Harris drops in the polls as Democratic rivals grab the spotlight.” More: “Her struggles were underscored this week when a new poll from UC Berkeley and The Los Angeles Times showed the senator in fourth place in California, her home state. At 13 percent, she’s even dropped below the cutoff for winning statewide delegates.” She says she doesn’t need any of that stinking congressional approval to rule by executive decree as President, and promises more soft illegal alien amnesty.
“The Democratic field has not only failed to oppose Sen. Sanders’ agenda, but they have actually pushed to embrace it,” he said at the National Press Club. “Democrats must say loudly and clearly that we are not socialists.”
Nobody will confuse Hickenlooper for a disciple of Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek. He advocates what he calls “regulated capitalism,” pushed for several major tax-hike measures while he was governor, and proposes spending $100 billion annually in “climate financing” to developing nations.
But he has a long history of supporting fossil fuel drilling. He opposes the absurdly expensive “Green New Deal,” “Medicare for all,” and supposedly “free” college for all (meaning financed by taxpayers). In May, he wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal in which he declared he is “running to save capitalism.”
Don’t take this as an endorsement of Hickenlooper — he leans too far leftward on far too many issues for me. But he’s kind of the canary in the coal mine. If Hickenlooper’s modest nods to centrism are no longer welcome in the Democratic Party, the country is in trouble. It is not democratic socialism but democratic capitalism that has made this the most economically powerful nation on earth. While Communist and socialist nations like the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Venezuela mire their people in collapse and despair, the world’s free economies thrive.
Washington Governor Jay Inslee: In. Twitter. Facebook. The Onion: “DNC Committee Throws Bound Jay Inslee Onto Melting Iceberg Before Pushing Him Out To Sea.” Inslee’s not winning friends back home in Washington state: “Governing by phone: Inside Inslee’s hectic first months on 2020 trail.”
Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. He’s coming for your health insurance. The Decline and Fall of Bernie Sanders. “The Dems, even the hard lefties, are looking for electability. And nobody really believes Bernie is it. Not against Biden. So portions of his base are switching to candidates who seemed like they might have a shot at breaking out, like Elizabeth Warren. That seems almost as delusional, but Warren, with her barrage of 5-year-plans, has swallowed a chunk of Bernie’s support.” Here’s a lefty complaining that he’ll get Elizabeth Warren elected by just not being socialist enough.
In March, Warren demonstrated her appetite for challenging the economic and political dominance of corporate titans by going directly at America’s biggest tech companies. In a speech in Long Island City, Queens — where local protesters demanded that Amazon drop its plan to build a big new campus — Warren connected the companies’ success at smothering start-up rivals to their influence in Washington. She remarked dryly that the large amounts that businesses like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple spend on lobbying is a “good return on investment if they can keep Washington from enforcing the antitrust laws.” She wants to use those laws to break up the companies instead — a move that no other major American politician had proposed.
After Warren started talking about the four tech giants, along with other critics, the Trump administration let it be known that it was scrutinizing them for potential antitrust violations. Conservatives have suspected social media platforms of bias against them for years, and with concerns about privacy violations escalating, big tech was suddenly a bipartisan target. Warren has specifics about how to reduce their influence; she wants to undo the mergers that allowed Facebook, for example, to snap up WhatsApp, rather than compete with it for users. Warren could unleash the power to bring major antitrust prosecutions without Congress — an answer to gridlock in Washington that’s crucially woven into some of her other plans too. (Warren also favors ending the filibuster in the Senate.) Warren wants to prevent companies that offer an online marketplace and have annual revenue of $25 billion or more from owning other companies that sell products on that platform. In other words, Amazon could no longer sell shoes and diapers and promote them over everyone else’s shoes and diapers — giving a small business a fair chance to break in.
Warren’s poll numbers have steadily climbed; in early June, two polls, one national and one in Nevada, had her in second, behind Joe Biden but ahead of Sanders, for the first time. With the help of advisers working from her headquarters, in Boston, Warren has been releasing a torrent of detailed policy proposals. She has issued a plan to dramatically reduce student debt and to offer free tuition at public colleges; a plan to unwind large agriculture conglomerates in order to make the market more equitable for family farms; a plan to require large corporations to pay more in federal taxes; a plan to dismantle the behemoth technology companies and regulate them like utilities; and new legislation to address opioid addiction, modelled on a bill passed by Congress in 1990 to combat the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic. She has announced an “Economic Patriotism” plan, intended to create opportunities for American workers, and has issued proposals targeted at Donald Trump, including one that would make it permissible to indict a sitting President.
Together, the proposals promise a new level of government intervention in almost every aspect of economic life. Some of the ideas are pragmatic; others seem aimed more at marketing than at implementation. Regardless, “I have a plan for that” has become a rallying cry for her campaign—an echo of the way that “Nevertheless, she persisted” became a tagline for Warren supporters after Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, used it to describe Warren’s refusal to stand down during the confirmation hearing for Jeff Sessions, Trump’s former Attorney General. In May, the comedian Ashley Nicole Black wrote, on Twitter, “Do you think Elizabeth Warren has a plan to fix my love life?” Warren responded, “DM me and let’s figure this out.” Even Tucker Carlson, the right-wing Fox News host, recently opened his show with an eight-minute monologue touting Warren’s Economic Patriotism plan, saying that she sounded like “Donald Trump at his best.”
The 2020 campaign is now only a couple of weeks away from its first Democratic debates, on June 26 and 27, in Miami. So it’s the right time for candidates to begin rolling out their policy platforms.
And none of them, not even the famously substantive Elizabeth Warren, has released more plans than Andrew Yang.
Yang is a former technology entrepreneur who has attracted more than 100,000 individual donors — enough to qualify him for inclusion in the first debates — in large part because of his detailed platform. His website includes more than 100 proposals.
Many of them revolve around Yang’s view that the American economy no longer works for the majority of people. He has proposed a universal basic income — $1,000 monthly checks for all adults — as well as more affordable college, a financial-transaction tax and rebuilding infrastructure. He has dozens of smaller ideas, too: free marriage counseling; more funding for autism; a ban on airlines removing passengers when they overbook flights; the return of congressional earmarks; and the extension of Daylight Saving Time to the entire year.
He’s also come out in favor of several ideas that regular newsletter readers will recognize: Supreme Court term limits, ranked-choice voting and statehood for Washington and Puerto Rico.
Finally, the speed and efficiency of federal bureaucracy can be extended to marriage counseling!
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, or for which I’ve seen no recent signs they’re running:
One of the more puzzling aspects of the Social Justice Warrior long march through the Democratic Party is how laughably absurd assertions that no sane person would have entertained 20 years ago have now become the latest (and therefore most sacred) belief of the victimhood identity politics left.
As a case in point, take the suddenly widespread, irrational and unscientific notion that “sex is a social construct” or that “gender is fluid.” Both of these are lies. The sex of an individual human being, as with all other primates, is determined genetically before birth. If you have XX chromosomes, you’re female, and if you have XY chromosomes you’re male, the only exceptions being an exceptionally tiny handful of odd genetic corner cases that make up a vanishingly small fraction of the human population. All a “sex change” operation does is change a person’s outer appearance, it does not change their genetically-determined sex.
The Democratically controlled House of Representatives voted Friday 236-173 in favor of the Equality Act, which would require schools to include male athletes who identify as transgender girls on female sports teams.
Eight Republicans crossed party lines to vote for the bill, which had unanimous Democratic support.
The bill amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to make “sexual orientation and gender identity” protected characteristics under federal anti-discrimination law.
Among other things, that would force public schools to expand female athletic teams to include biological males who identify as transgender girls.
Republican Florida Rep. Greg Steube introduced a last-minute amendment to the bill that would have preserved Title IX’s protections of female athletic teams, but Democrats rejected it.
Every House Democrat but one co-sponsored the legislation. The only Democrat who wasn’t a co-sponsor, Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinski, announced his support for the bill following pressure from left-wing activists.
“People need to wake up. This radical bill is going to totally eliminate women’s and girls sports,” Republican Arizona Rep. Debbie Lesko warned in an op-ed Thursday.
Republican Missouri Rep. Vicky Hartzler and a half-dozen other House Republicans held a press conference Thursday in opposition to what Hartzler dubbed the “Inequality Act.”
“Congress enacted Title IX to provide equal opportunities for women in education and sports. All this is erased under H.R. 5,” Hartzler said at the press conference.
It’s not just women’s sports. Hartzler fears that it could also affect “domestic-violence shelters and other ‘safe spaces’ that have traditionally barred men.”
Republicans who voted for the bill include representatives Susan W. Brooks (IN), Mario Diaz-Balart (FL), Brian Fitzpatrick (PN), John Katko (NY), Will Hurd (TX), Tom Reed (NY), Elise Stefanik (NY) and and Greg Walden (OR). I know he’s a moderate in a swing district, but Hurd’s vote is especially disappointing, as I don’t see Hispanics in south and west Texas crying out for transsexual rights.
A bevy of arguments against the compromise have been provided. The first is that testosterone is no big deal when it comes to athletic ability. Men and women both have testosterone after all, and some in each sex have naturally higher levels than others. So why force someone to take meds — with side effects — when they are merely above average in one particular characteristic among the many that ultimately affect athletic performance? This appears to be the driving point behind a recent New York Times op-ed, “The Myth of Testosterone.” The authors — both professors who adhere to social-justice ideology — make some decent points. They usefully complicate the impact of testosterone on performance in differing sports, note that its effects are far more varied and subtle than mere physical strength. They then argue that “the International Association of Athletics Federations’ own analysis of testosterone and performance, involving more than 1,100 women competing in track and field events, shows that for six of the 11 running events, women with lower testosterone actually did better than those with higher levels.” Then this: “In other words, for most sports, testosterone levels do not correlate with superior performance.”
To put it mildly, this is bonkers. Women have a range of 0.3–2.4 npl, and we know that Semenya must have more than 5 npl, or the regulations would not apply to her. Men, in contrast, have a range from 10–38 npl. There’s not even an overlap. The range among women is tiny compared with the difference between men and women. Of course testosterone correlates with superior performance! That’s the entire reason we have separate contests for the two sexes. And the entire reason we forbid doping. How the New York Times could publish this deeply misleading sentence (to be polite) is beyond me.
Current testosterone levels per se also don’t account for the effect of the hormone throughout a man’s life. Doriane Coleman, Duke law professor and former 800-meter running champion, notes how profound the effects are:
Compared to females, males have greater lean body mass (more skeletal muscle and less fat), larger hearts (both in absolute terms and scaled to lean body mass), higher cardiac outputs, larger hemoglobin mass, larger VO2 max (i.e. a person’s ability to take in oxygen), greater glycogen utilization, and higher anaerobic capacity.
A physician who ignored these differences would lose her license. Gender studies professors apparently make careers out of denying it. So take the top female runners in the world right now: Literally thousands of boys and men would beat them. Coleman elaborates: “In the single year 2017, Olympic and World Champion Allyson Felix’s lifetime best in the 400 meters of 49.26 seconds was surpassed over 15,000 times by boys and by men.” Remove the distinction between male and female testosterone levels, and no women will be in any major athletic contest for the foreseeable future.
Reality is not optional, and I sincerely doubt that the vast majority of American voters are willing to accept the “sex is a social construct” canard peddled by the Social Justice Warrior left. This isn’t an issue that divides Democrats from Republicans, it’s an issue that divides lunatics from normal Americans. If the radical tranny agenda is the hill Democrats want to die on, the President Donald Trump and Republicans should make them die on it in 2020.
Here we are, a week after one of the biggest political upsets in American history, and the reverberations are still being felt. Democrats seem to be stuck in the anger and denial phases of the Kubler-Ross grieving cycle, and probably won’t get to bargaining until the 2017 legislative session opens with Republicans in charge of the White House, Senate, and House.
While liberals were losing their minds over Trump, India was losing its mind by banning all bills over $1.50. The idea is evidently to force Indians to accept a cashless society (in the name of “fighting corruption”), but it’s actually grinding India’s economy to a halt.
More on the Democratic Party wipeout: “Republicans are now in control of a record 67 (68 percent) of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers in the nation, more than twice the number (31) in which Democrats have a majority.”
Conservatives have a once in a lifetime opportunity at the state level. Including supermajorities in a number of states, a Democratic Party which has gerrymandered itself into oblivion, and almost enough states to call a constitutional convention.
Mark Steyn. “If you keep insisting that half your fellow citizens are haters, maybe you’re the hater.” Also this: “One third of the Democrats’ representation in the House now comes from just three states – New York, Massachusetts and California. That’s one reason why they’re calling for the abolition of the Electoral College.”
Trump to hold post-election tour rallies in swing states. 1. He’s closed the sale, and now he’s servicing the account. 2. You know Obama has to be kicking himself for not thinking of that.
More from the Democratic Party’s genius candidate selection process. “If you could choose any state in America where you might want to run a shemale candidate for the United States States, Utah probably wouldn’t be your first choice, nor anywhere in the top 40.”
Threaten to kill random white people after Trump’s election? Expect to spend some time in involuntary committal for a mental assessment. Even if you’re a university professor.
Rapper Kanye West says he would have voted for Trump…and will run for President in 2020. West is an idiot savant black nationalist car wreck married to Kim Kardashian, but after this year, would you really say he has no chance of being elected? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
I will say this for West: He knows where to steal his riffs:
How many piece of Gnostic symbolism can you spot in that video?
After the uproar of parents, citizens, and students in Fort Worth over the past 3 months, the Fort Worth Independents School District (FWISD) has reversed its dangerous transgender guidelines that allowed boys into girls’ showers, locker-rooms, and bathrooms. The school district issued new guidelines today with significant changes that should go a long way to better protect all students in FWISD.
Among the policy changes:
An explicit affirmation of parental rights: “Parents are partners with educators, administrators, and the board in their children’s education. Parents shall be encouraged to actively participate in creating and implementing education programs for their children. Texas Education Code § 26.001(a) unless otherwise provided by law, a board, an administrator, an educator or other person may not limit parental rights. Texas Education Code § 20.001(c).”
The critical recognition that “A parent is entitled to full information regarding the school activities of the student, except as precluded by Texas law.”
The replacement of rules about restroom and locker-room access. The previous rules have been replaced with the statement that accommodation requests will be “reviewed and addressed on a case-by-case basis based upon the particular circumstances of the individual student and school facilities.”
The removal of an unlawful requirement that punished school officials for notifying parents if their child showed transgender behavior.
Here’s a hint for the Social Justice Warrior crowd: Ft. Worth, like most Texas cities, is not going to take your culture war shenanigans lying down.
As expected, all seven Texas constitutional amendments passed easily. The two most heavily promoted amendments, Proposition 1 (homestead property tax relief) and Proposition 7 (dedicating sales tax money to the highway fund), each passed with more than 80% of the vote.
Other Texas voting news:
Houston’s unpopular “tranny bathroom bill” went down in flames. Liberals crying foul that their pet transgender culture war bill was reduced to tranny bathrooms might want to remember that no one forced Houston Mayor Annise Parker (who whispered not a word of it during her own election campaign) to bring it up, and certainly wasn’t forced to sue churches who dared oppose it. Every time an item on the Social Justice Warrior agenda actually gets put before voters, it loses big time.
Austin voters rejected a courthouse bond package derided as a big-spending boondoggle. And keep in mind that Austin voters practically never turn down bond proposals.
But it wasn’t just Texas. Across the nation, conservatives won big in off-year elections:
Republican Matt Bevin won a big upset in the Kentucky governor’s race. The guy who Mitch McConnell crushed by 25 points in a 2014 primary will now become just the second Republican to govern the Bluegrass State in four decades.
Democrats failed to pick up Virginia’s state Senate. It’s a huge blow to Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who went all-in to make it happen. Democrats could have won by capturing just one seat because of the tie-breaking authority of Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam (D). But Republicans held every single seat…
Even in San Francisco, the sheriff who steadfastly defended the city’s “sanctuary city” policy went down. Fox News: “Ross Mirkarimi and his office received heavy criticism after Mexican illegal immigrant Francisco Sanchez allegedly shot and killed 32-year-old Kate Steinle on San Francisco’s waterfront July 1. Sanchez had been released from Mirkarimi’s jail in March even though federal immigration officials had requested that he be detained for possible deportation.” The city also rejected new regulations on Airbnb.
The Kentucky Governor’s race was the one where Fark’s Drew Curtis ran as an independent. He garnered just over 3% of the vote.
Once there was a physicist named Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt who used her scientific background to create a radially improved putter. The only problem with the story is that pretty much every word but “putter” in the previous sentence is a complete lie.
Including “her.”
And inevitably, the very fact that Caleb Hannan would dare report that “Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt” used to be Stephen Krol ignited a firestorm of controversy among the victimhood identity politics crowd, as exemplified by the #JusticeForDrV tag.
I first saw the link for Caleb Hannan’s story on the magical putter and the serial liar behind it from Dwight, but The Other McCain has been doing the heavy lifting on the reactions. (I thought I had added McCain to the blogroll back when the story of convicted felon Brett Kimberlin first blew up, but I guess I didn’t; that oversight has now been corrected.) )(It was already there, my eyes just missed it. D’oh!) His summary nicely gets to the heart of the matter:
The #JusticeForDrV crusaders grabbed hold of the idea that “Dr. Vanderbilt” was driven to suicide by Caleb Hannan’s “transmisogynistic journalism” — a claim for which they offer no real evidence — while ignoring all evidence that (a) “Dr. Vanderbilt” was not a victim, but rather a person who victimized others, and (b) it was the failure of the pseudo-scientific putter scam, not fear of being “outed” as transgender, which motivated “Dr. Vanderbilt” to commit suicide. Of course, “Dr. Vanderbilt” had attempted suicide in 2008, before Hannan ever heard of her, but why let facts get in your way when you’re ghoulishly exploiting a corpse as “LGBT Victim of the Week”?
The #JusticeForDrV tag, of course is ironic, since, as McCain put it:
McCain dealt admirably with the substance of the issue, but I wanted to deal with the mindset behind those using the #JusticeForDrV tag, since I’ve run into it more than once.
This is another case of the intolerant acolytes of victimhood identity politics mobbing someone for daring to tell the truth. The animating idea behind it seems to be that no one has a right to say anything that might make a tranny (or any other member of a Designated Victim Group) feel bad, even if it’s the truth. They have abrogated for themselves the right to dictate to others what the acceptable limits to free speech are as regards members of said victim groups. It’s an attempt to silence critics (both actively and preemptively) who do not toe the political correct, neo-Marxist, Critical Race Theory line that the “privileged” (straight white heterosexual conservative males in particular) should not be allowed to speak on any issue that touches on the “marginalized” (i.e., the members of any left-wing victimhood identity politics group). Their terminology is Orwellian in the very specific way that it seeks to shape language and limit discourse in ways that make it impossible to object to the agenda being pushed.
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,” he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. “Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”
Or, put another way by the same author “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
Or, to put it still another way, “Freedom is the freedom to say that a man is a man and a woman is a woman.” Those pushing the #JusticeForDrV tag are largely the same as those who assert Bradley Manning magically became a woman by changing his name. The idea that “gender is a social construct” is a great lie that they must furiously defend, no matter how obviously absurd. Hannan’s article is unclear on whether Krol was merely a cross-dresser or had gender reassignment surgery; in neither instance would the chromosomes in the trillions of cells in his body have been switched from xy to xx.
And as for Hannan having “outed” someone who used to work at “an LGBT bar,” as McCain also notes: “When a 6-foot-3 middle-aged man gets a sex change, the result is unlikely to be particularly . . . persuasive.”
Caleb Hannan’s great crime was to commit an act of investigative journalism against a member of a designated victim group. (The whole “without fear or favor” slogan must go over social justice warrior heads, since favor is one of the defining principles of identity politics.) I’ve not seen a single credible accusation that the facts Hannan uncovered were untrue. Had Krol not been a serial liar, Hannan would never have been investigating him. His crime is he cared more about journalistic truth than politically correct guidelines on “acceptable discourse.” I would hope all journalists value truth over political correctness (though surveying the dominance of left-wing thought in the mainstream media, this is probably a vain hope).
I’ll end with the same conclusion McCain ended with:
“Facts are stubborn things, as John Adams said. And the simple fact is that Essay Anne Vanderbilt’s entire life was a huge lie.”
