We are fortunate indeed to have real world results that we can look at for how well or how poorly governing philosophies and agendas work. America’s major cities have been dominated by the Democratic Party for decades, and the results are in.
All but 3 of America’s largest cities are run by Democratic mayors. The 3 largest cities – New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, are losing population every year.
Several of the most violent cities in America, including Albuquerque, Memphis, Detroit, Chicago and Washington, DC are run by Democrats.
States that are bleeding population every year due to high taxation, over-regulation, decaying cities and failing public services including New York, Connecticut, California and others are all run by Democrats.
States that have low to no income taxes, are right-to-work and favor energy development do better economically than high tax, forced union and energy unfriendly states. According to the annual economic outlook rankings published by the American Legislative Exchange Council Center for State Fiscal Reform, in 2019 the bottom ten states were all run by Democrats and the top 10 states except two were run by Republicans.
Needless to say, the top 10 states all have higher GDP, better quality public services, and are experiencing net in-migration. Nevada is an outlier in that it recently flipped blue. However, they have no personal income taxes, a low corporate income tax and they are a right to work state.
Finally, all of the bottom ten states have net out-migration, high tax burdens, and lower quality of life.
The evidence couldn’t be more clear. Democrats are incapable of governing well, or in some cases, such as Seattle or Chicago, governing at all. Every single city that has problems with decaying infrastructure, gentrification, crime, violence, homelessness and other social pathologies are governed by Democrats. They promise a boundless cornucopia of “free” (i.e. taxpayer-funded) services and programs to meet every demand of the creeping socialism we’re seeing in America, at the cost of trampling people’s constitutional rights including property rights.
Critics assailing the Department of Homeland Security for “over-stepping their bounds” in Portland have it 100 percent wrong. The department is in the right.
Further, its actions thus far should just be the first step in disrupting the organized violence aimed at intimidating public officials, injuring law enforcement officers, destroying public and private property and making our streets less safe.
Let’s be clear. We are not talking about “peaceful protests.” What is going on in Portland, as well as Seattle and some other is an array of criminal activity: rioting, looting, arson, assaulting law enforcement officers and more. This is flat out criminal activity.
And it is not all spontaneous. This is organized criminal activity.
For starters, the rioters are targeting cities where public officials have created a more permissive environment. They have restricted the actions of local and state law enforcement. When rioters are arrested, they release them quickly, refusing to prosecute.
Moreover, these officials refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement. In sum, they have turned their cities into “soft targets” for criminals.
Violence has spiked in cities nationwide following weeks-long anti-police protests over the death of George Floyd, according to government statistics and media reports.
Residents in Minneapolis have created patrol groups to protect themselves after the city’s crime spike, and shootings in Atlanta rose 265% compared to last year during an almost month-long period. Seattle’s “Capital Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ) led to a 525% increase in crime, including the death of two teenagers.
As crime rates rose, activists have called to abolish the police, an idea that’s gained traction among liberals. Former Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon, singer John Legend and women’s soccer star Megan Rapinoe have all supported dismantling the police, and protesters have touted the idea during demonstrations.
The Minneapolis City Council unanimously voted to dismantle their police department next May, and a school board in Oakland, California, voted to ban the police from its schools.
Saturday’s protest activity was billed as the biggest yet, at least in part due to the shooting of Garrett Foster. Foster was the man who apparently pointed his AK-47 rifle at the car window of driver Daniel Perry while protesters surrounded and pounded on his car during an unpermitted protest and illegal taking of the public street just before 10 p.m. on July 25. Perry, an Army sergeant and licensed handgun carrier, fired his weapon after Foster had used his rifle to order Perry to roll his car window down. Pointing a gun at someone can, obviously, be read as hostile action. Texas’s castle law covers drivers in vehicles defending themselves, including the use of deadly force.
APD and the Texas Department of Public Safety were ready for Saturday’s action, making this post short.
Law enforcement officers were deployed and ready downtown. According to a source familiar with Saturday’s events, no officers were injured. Little force was used in shutting down the protest — which illegally blocked streets and was intended to bring violence to Austin. No property was damaged despite the protesters’ plan. They did take roads illegally, briefly including Interstate 35, the main highway that runs through downtown Austin. Protesters harassed innocent diners and others downtown.
These assholes, and the decision to let Austin become bumsville, is why so many downtown restaurants are in danger of closing. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
The Democratic National Committee released a platform 180 degrees off from the spin. It’s so pro-Iran that the National Iranian-American Council, the de facto Iranian regime lobby in Washington, immediately “applauded” the DNC “for its forward-leaning platform commitments on issues of importance to the Iranian-American community.” It demonstrates that President Obama’s curious preference for the supremacists running the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, rather than our traditional regional allies, has become mainstream Democratic ideology.
Trump administration policies have brought the bloody Islamic Republic to its knees. The Democrats seek to restore its vitality by ending sanctions and re-entering President Obama’s odious Iran deal. Every faction across Israel’s notoriously fractious political spectrum agreed that this deal was an existential threat. Biden and the 2020 Democrats take the opposing view: Regime change is wrong; diplomacy and economic engagement can restrain the mullahs.
Next up, the Gulf Arabs: A new generation of leaders have recently expanded women’s rights, confronted Islamism, acted to curb terrorism, deepened ties to the U.S. and moved towards ending the Arab/Israeli conflict. Biden and the 2020 Democrats prefer to “reset” those warm relations in order to keep America’s traditional Gulf allies at arms length.
“Five GOP lawmakers filed a lawsuit against Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott (R) over a contact-tracing contract signed with MTX Group in May. The Frisco-based private company agreed to a $295.3 million dollar deal after defeating several well-known corporations. But lawmakers argue that the bidding process bypassed constitutional requirements and voice concerns about the ability of MTX to mitigate privacy concerns.” The Republicans suing are State Reps Mike Lang, Kyle Biederman, William Zedler and Steve Toth, and state Senator Bob Hall. And the MTX contract does stink.
The mainstream media as a whole – especially the political news media in and around the DC/NYC/Beltway area – has two options: They can straighten up their acts and stop insulting the intelligence of their audiences or they can continue to show their (mostly left-wing) partisan stripes and turn audiences off.
If recent history is any indication, however, they’ll be going with option two – because they’ve shown over and over again that when it comes to demonstrating a commitment to objective reporting versus pushing biased political angles that help Democrats, they will choose those biased political angles nearly every time.
Nima “Rolex” Fazeli, a 22-year-old from Orlando, Fla., was charged in a criminal complaint in Northern California with aiding and abetting intentional access to a protected computer.
Mason “Chaewon” Sheppard, a 19-year-old from Bognor Regis, U.K., also was charged in California with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering and unauthorized access to a computer.
A U.S. Justice Department statement on the matter does not name the third defendant charged in the case, saying juvenile proceedings in federal court are sealed to protect the identity of the youth. But an NBC News affiliate in Tampa reported today that authorities had arrested 17-year-old Graham Clark as the alleged mastermind of the hack.
Wfla.com said Clark was hit with 30 felony charges, including organized fraud, communications fraud, one count of fraudulent use of personal information with over $100,000 or 30 or more victims, 10 counts of fraudulent use of personal information and one count of access to a computer or electronic device without authority. Clark’s arrest report is available here (PDF). A statement from prosecutors in Florida says Clark will be charged as an adult.
Social Justice Warrior Akilah Hughes sues Sargon of Akkad over his fair use of one of her videos, despite the judge telling her that was a bad idea, promptly gets her ass handed to her, and is ordered to pay $38,000 in attorney’s fees. Showing the same level of self-awareness that got her where she is, she attacks the judge and labels Sargon a “white supremacist.”
The huge hypocrisy of Democrats allowing #BlackLivesMatters protests during lockdowns.
How cops stood down during the protests and how the media lied about them.
“O.J. Simpson was mostly peaceful that night.”
“If you’re protesting, that’s First Amendment activity. If you break a window, you should go to jail.”
“At some point somebody has to restore some semblance of order.”
On White Fragility: “A greater pile of horseshit has never been produced by a bevy of horses.”
SJW/antiracists think that “meritocracy and individualism is an aspect of whiteness…in order to be anti-racist, you have to want to tear down the entire system. They literally say this.”
The garbage of the 1619 Project.
“The greatest predictor of poverty in America remains single motherhood.”
My biggest question, as it usually is when Rogan talks about poverty, is whether he’s read Charles Murray’s Losing Ground. If you’re concerned about poverty in America, that’s a bedrock text for understanding it…
Important tip: If you’re attacking police, looting and committing arson in the name of a radical Marxist ideology, honest law-abiding gun owners think you’re the bad guy and happy to see you get vanned. Enjoy 20 years in Club Fed to contemplate the errors of your ways.
Idiot rioters and their identifying tattoos, more elected Democrats behaving badly, and a higher than usual helping of cute animals. Enjoy your Friday LinkSwarm!
Borepatch points out that U.S. Wuhan coronavirus deaths hit post-March lows. Also, all U.S. deaths are now far below the norms.
This was not just a bad flu. The data are crystal clear on that.
However, the data did not justify shutting down the economy. The data did not justify preventing you from saying goodbye to Grandma on her deathbed. The data did not justify prohibiting public gatherings at funerals. The data did not justify shutting down Sunday church. The data did not justify shutting down the schools. The data don’t justify mandatory mask wearing. The data don’t justify the hype.
George Soros-backed St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner, who charged Mark and Patricia McCloskey with felonies for using guns to protect their homes, illegally took several trips took several trips paid for by activist groups that she failed to disclose. Fair and Just Prosecution is the name of the activist group in question.
Tennessee Democratic state senator Katrina Robinson was charged with swindling $600,000 in federal funds to pay for her wedding and a lavish lifestyle.
“Say Her Name” is one of the slogans that activists have connected to this Louisville shooting, but if we want to understand why police shot Breonna Taylor, there is another name that needs to be said — Jamarcus Glover.
Glover is a 30-year-old narcotics trafficker who police say was dealing crack cocaine and marijuana out of a “trap house” on Elliott Avenue in Louisville’s west side. According to a police affidavit, detectives had Glover and his accomplice Adrian Walker under surveillance, and had seen their car — a red Dodge Charger with Mississippi plates — “make frequent trips” from the Elliott Avenue “trap house” to an apartment 10 miles away on Springfield Drive. Detective Joshua Jaynes wrote in the affidavit that Glover was using the Springfield Drive apartment as his mailing address; Jaynes said he had witnessed Glover pick up a postal package at the apartment; and, citing his “training and experience,” Jaynes stated his belief that Glover “may be keeping narcotics and/or proceeds from the sale of narcotics” at the Springfield Drive apartment. All of this was stated in an application for a search warrant of the Springfield Drive apartment where Breonna Taylor lived.
You see, Jamarcus Glover was Breonna Taylor’s ex-boyfriend. They broke up a couple years ago, according to a lawyer for Taylor’s family who said she maintained a “passive friendship” with Glover. This “friendship” apparently included allowing Glover to receive his mail at her apartment, and, although there is no evidence that Taylor was ever involved in Glover’s drug operation, the “training and experience” of Detective Jaynes led him to believe there must be some connection. This was convincing enough for Jefferson County Circuit Court Judge Mary Shaw, who approved the so-called “no-knock” warrant for Taylor’s apartment, and also approved nearly identical warrants for the four other addresses linked to Glover’s drug operation, including the Elliott Avenue “trap house.”
Louisville police served all five warrants almost simultaneously, shortly after midnight on March 13. Glover was arrested at the Elliott Avenue address, but the raid on Taylor’s apartment went horribly wrong. Police Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, who was part of the five-man squad assigned to serve the warrant on the Springfield Drive address, said the squad was told in a preliminary briefing that this was a “soft target” because Taylor was believed to be alone in the apartment. Therefore, Sgt. Mattingly said, the decision was made for officers to knock on the door and announce themselves as police, despite the authorization for a “no-knock” entry. Sgt. Mattingly knocked for about a minute, he said, before the supervising lieutenant ordered them to “hit it,” using a battering ram to breach the door.
Inside the apartment, however, Breonna Taylor was not alone. She had a new boyfriend visiting her, and they were watching a movie in her bedroom. The boyfriend, Kenneth Walker (no relation to Glover’s accomplice Adrian Walker) had a legally owned pistol, and when he heard somebody pounding on the front door, he grabbed his weapon. Why? Because he was “scared to death,” believing that the person pounding on the door might be Taylor’s drug-dealer ex-boyfriend. Walker and Taylor emerged from the bedroom into the hallway of the apartment and, Walker said, Taylor called out, “Who is it?”
The next thing that happened, in Walker’s description of the incident, is the door “comes off its hinges” — the police are busting in, but he doesn’t know it’s the police. If you’re dating a drug dealer’s ex-girlfriend and somebody busts through your door at 12:30 in the morning, what do you do?
Walker fired a shot, hitting Sgt. Mattingly in the thigh, and Sgt. Mattingly immediately returned fire, getting off six shots. Two other officers also opened fire. In total, police fired at least 22 shots, none of which hit Walker, but Taylor was struck eight times and died on the scene. Although a grand jury indicted Walker on a charge of attempted murder of a police officer, that charge was dismissed in May at the request of Commonwealth’s Attorney Tom Wine.
Lest people think I always follow President Trump’s policy position, here’s another one I differ on: Russia shouldn’t be let back into the G7 as long as they’re occupying parts of Ukraine.
Speaking of super-genius rioters and tattoos, Edward Thomas Schinzing was arrested on federal arson charges in Portland thanks to the fact he was shirtless and had his own name tattooed across his back.
The Washington press corps seems engaged in a collective demonstration of the legal concept of willful blindness, or deliberately ignoring the facts, following the release of yet another declassified document which directly refutes prior statements about the investigation into Russia collusion. The document shows that FBI officials used a national security briefing of then candidate Donald Trump and his top aides to gather possible evidence for Crossfire Hurricane, its code name for the Russia investigation.
It is astonishing that the media refuses to see what is one of the biggest stories in decades. The Obama administration targeted the campaign of the opposing party based on false evidence. The media covered Obama administration officials ridiculing the suggestions of spying on the Trump campaign and of improper conduct with the Russia investigation. When Attorney General William Barr told the Senate last year that he believed spying did occur, he was lambasted in the media, including by James Comey and others involved in that investigation. The mocking “wow” response of the fired FBI director received extensive coverage.
The new document shows that, in summer 2016, FBI agent Joe Pientka briefed Trump campaign advisers Michael Flynn and Chris Christie over national security issues, standard practice ahead of the election. It had a discussion of Russian interference. But this was different. The document detailing the questions asked by Trump and his aides and their reactions was filed several days after that meeting under Crossfire Hurricane and Crossfire Razor, the FBI investigation of Flynn. The two FBI officials listed who approved the report are Kevin Clinesmith and Peter Strzok.
Clinesmith is the former FBI lawyer responsible for the FISA surveillance conducted on members of the Trump campaign. He opposed Trump and sent an email after the election declaring “viva the resistance.” He is now under review for possible criminal charges for altering a FISA court filing. The FBI used Trump adviser Carter Page as the basis for the original FISA application, due to his contacts with Russians. After that surveillance was approved, however, federal officials discredited the collusion allegations and noted that Page was a CIA asset. Clinesmith had allegedly changed the information to state that Page was not working for the CIA.
Meet the source for all the most salacious claims in the debunked Steele dossier: Russian-born habitual drunk Igor Danchenko, who used to work for the Brookings Institution.
From the “facts pulled out of our ass” department:
Other outlets have asked for this evidence too, and have similarly come up with nothing.
"Richmond officials have presented no direct evidence showing white supremacists organized the protest, encouraged violence or participated in any property damage."https://t.co/RJKpblJXi5
Well, every single gun nut in America has spent their entire adult life being continually mocked, insulted, and belittled by the left. You’ve done nothing but paint us as the bad guys.
In Hollywood, we’re always evil, stupid, violent, malicious, redneck, racist, murderers. That’s so ingrained in the liberal religion that when “ally” Harvey Weinstein was trying to get out of being a sleazy rapist, his repentance consisted of promising to make more movies about how the NRA is bad.
In the news, everything is always our fault. If there is a mass murder, we can always count on the vultures to swoop in and blame America’s gun culture. They flog it for weeks on end, 24/7 coverage, hoping for gun control. And if the identity of the shooter doesn’t fit the narrative, it drops off the news in mere hours.
And then at the local, state, and federal level, legally speaking, the left fucks us at every opportunity. You ban everything you can get away with. You ban things that literally make no sense. You ban shit just out of spite.
When we fight back against gun control laws, you declare we are stupid because only the police should have guns (hey, aren’t those the guys you are protesting right now?)
“Stupid racist rednecks! We live in a civilized society! Don’t you realize the police will protect us?” until when your democrat cities are on fire, and you call 911 and the operator tells you sorry, the police can’t come to your house right now, please try not to get murdered… How is that strict gun control working out for you?
Then you did everything in your power to chase gun owners out of your sainted liberal strongholds. You passed laws. You banned everything we like. Forced all the shooting ranges to close. Forced most of the gun stores to close. And just generally let us know that our kind is not welcome there.
But now you’ve started some shit, YOU want US to go into democrat cities, with democrat mayors, and democrat police chiefs enforcing democrat policies which cause strife among democrats, in order to get into gun fights on your behalf?
How fucking gullible do you think we are? 😀 Like holy shit. Damn dude!
Because we all know that literally 30 seconds after a gun nut blows away a government employee on your behalf, then all the national media coverage of the riots will instantly cease (sorta like the Corona Virus coverage did) and it’ll be back to the news breathlessly reporting about right wing extremist gun nuts, and all you useless fucks would go back to whining for more dumb ass gun control.
You’ve already thrown the black community under the bus, cheering as their neighborhoods get burned and yours are safe. Seriously, white liberals are the shittiest “allies” in history, and your moral foundation has the consistency of Play-Doh. Your moral compass is a wind sock.
So what did it take to turn spineless lefty Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler into a law-and-order guy? Trying to create an “autonomous zone” on his own street. “By 1 a.m., elaborate barricades had been erected. But in the early hours of Thursday morning, police moved into the area, declaring it an unlawful assembly. Portland Police estimated about 50 people were in the area when they dispersed the autonomous zone.”
It’s certainly frustrating to watch a pack of reeking leftist scumbags declare a portion of an American city an “autonomous zone” – what is it with Democrats and their secession fetish? – but do not get frustrated because Donald Trump has not sent the 101st Airborne in to powerwash the human grunge from Seattle’s feces-bedecked streets.
That’s what the Democrats want. And Trump – a better strategic thinker than all the media geniuses, hack politicians, and Afghan War-losing generals who cry about him – is not only not going to give them the victory they crave. He’s going to jam their cheesy plan down their throats.
The libs’ plan to win in November corresponds to Trump’s plan to crush them yet again. Skeptical? Consider this. In the five years since he rode down that escalator bringin’ hell with him, how many times have they come at Trump and won? Zero. He’s spent half a decade on the edge of doom and he’s still here. Why would you think that the walls are suddenly closing in now? You shouldn’t.
Let’s understand the strategic scenario. The long-term strategic objective of the leftists is to turn the United States into Venezuela, and they want to be Maduro. The major strategic objective that will put them in position to do so is victory in the November elections. Everything happening right now is part of their overall strategy to achieve that objective. But what kind of operation are they using to achieve that objective? There are two types of operations relevant here – kinetic and information. A kinetic operation is actual warfare. It’s violence designed to defeat the enemy and cause his surrender by either physically destroying him or occupying his territory and compelling surrender. An information operation is designed to affect the perceptions, and thereby the actions, of the target. Kinetic ops tend to do something to the enemy; and info op tends to get the target to do something to himself.
Elections are usually information operations. They attempt to build a narrative and play on perceptions and cause the target to take the action that will lead to victory. That is, get the target (the electorate) vote for the candidate the info operator wants elected.
Okay, so what is the 2020 elections, with the rioting, vandalism, violence and occupations?
This still an information operation, not a kinetic one.
They want to convince us we are powerless, that everyone else supports their commie agenda, that we cannot win. Their tactics are designed to create that impression and crush our morale. These include the 24/7 media hype, the outright media lies, the movie stars with their dumb PSAs, the staged statue attacks, the corporate solidarity proclamations, the social media cancellations, and the craven kneeling by people who are supposed to stand up for us. But another tactic, familiar to any student of insurgencies, is to provoke an overreaction by those in power in order to undermine its moral authority. They want is to make us (including the president) think this is a kinetic operation, and get our side to make fundamental strategic errors by failing to recognize the true nature of the threat. They hope that such a mismatch between perception and reality will then lead to gravely damaging blunders. One of those would be Trump succumbing to his legit frustration and sending in a bunch of federal troops to crack skulls in Seattle.
Defining this insurgency as a kinetic operation supports the leftists’ information operation goal of making Americans perceive the situation as out of control, of there being chaos, and of making the election of Grandpa Badfinger being the only thing that will resolve the situation. But there is no kinetic situation to resolve – at least none that is strategically significant in a kinetic sense. Despite the hype, the protests may have involved a peak of 2 million people across the country – out of 330 million. That’s nothing kinetically; it’s significant informationally because it is pushed by so many cultural influencers. The scurvy scumbags of Antifa hold essentially no ground except the turf they are physically standing on at the moment, and that is minuscule. Even the hilarious Road Warrior Republic of Seattle is not even a rounding error of a rounding error in terms of US territory. It’s significant only in the context of an information operation.
Many of us cons are furious that Trump is “doing nothing.” This is the wrong thing to think. Trump is only doing nothing if this is a kinetic operation; because this is an information operation, not going kinetic (sending in the troops) is doing something. And in fact, Trump is employing the law enforcement component of his kinetic assets by having the feds wait and arrest Antifa types after the protests end, and hitting them with hardcore federal rioting-related charges. Previously, they would get ticketed and released; now, looking at a five-to-ten stretch, the lawyers their daddies hired to get these sunshine anarchists out of their beefs are going to be advising them to roll over so they can start back up at Cornell in September and not at Leavenworth.
Who benefits then from our national nervous breakdown that never seems to end?
It is the globalist elites who still govern most of our society today, despite the invasion of Donald Trump.
And those elites wish to continue that rule through what they fervently hope will come as the outcome of these demonstrations—more government control, particularly government control that helps them.
They have seen it done elsewhere with results they might want to emulate, at least until recently.
Call it China Envy.
The Chinese Communist Party has, over the years, found a way to regulate their society to an extraordinary degree via a form of communism that maximizes profits and power for those (party) elites while holding the masses largely at bay.
No wonder our elites are jealous.
People call ours “globalists” but they’re not really global. They’re selectively global, but actually just greedy and power-hungry, like the ChiComs.
Whether planned or not, or partially planned, the current confluence of catastrophes has offered them an opportunity to advance their cause against their natural adversary, Mr. Trump.
In macro, that is the landscape of election 2020—the globalist elites represented, for the moment anyway, by Joe Biden versus the American people, represented by Donald Trump.
Many of those American people, heavily influenced by the media and repelled by the president’s rhetoric, do not realize that he is representing them, but he is. Ignorant, often willfully, they oppose him tooth and nail.
An equal number, or possibly larger, as the one million plus requesting tickets to his Tulsa rally indicates, supports Mr. Trump.
We are in the midst of a Battle Royale for the soul of our nation, whether it remains more or less the democratic republic the Founders envisioned or becomes an Americanized version of what has been evolved by the CCP.
If the latter, ironically, then such groups as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa will be kicked to the curb once victory has been achieved and secured.
It’s always the same thing: Our newspapers are full of intense interest in Harvard’s admissions standards but have very little to say about New York City’s dropout rate. People can’t help being fascinated with themselves and their peers. If you want to know what is on the minds of the leaders of the American ruling class, it’s no secret. They’ll tell you, if you ask — and if you don’t.
George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police. More than a third of black students will drop out of high school in Milwaukee. But Forbes has announced a change in its in-house stylebook and will henceforth honor the woke convention of uppercase Black vs. lowercase white. And George Floyd is still dead. Jacob Frey is still mayor of Minneapolis. Medaria Arradondo is still the chief of police.
Oh, but they got James Bennet, the opinion editor at the New York Times. And surely that is something? It is, indeed, a very useful illustration of the E-Class vs. S-Class divide. Bennet was fired after purportedly endangering the lives of black Times staffers — a charge no mentally normal adult actually takes seriously — by publishing a guest column about the riots and the Insurrection Act by Senator Tom Cotton. The campaign to end Bennet did not come from America’s poor black communities as the workers of the world looked up, stunned, from page A24 of the New York Times — the venom came straight and undiluted from 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y., with Bennet’s underlings and juniors more or less putting him on an ice floe and pushing him out to sea.
Bennet was pushed out on behalf of marginalized black Americans, which necessitated that Bennet immediately be replaced by . . . a well-off white woman who went to Georgetown and Columbia and won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about that great loathsome theater of American middle-class anxiety: restaurants. (“The real price of inexpensive menu items,” the Pulitzer people summarized.) Well-off white women from elite colleges run the diversity-and-sensitivity racket like the 17th-century Dutch ran the tulip racket, like the De Beers cartel used to run diamonds. Big Caitlyn is getting paid. Affluent white women are the main E-Class beneficiaries of the current headhunting project to clear a little room at the top, just as they have historically been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative-action programs, contracting set-asides, and other programs to help out the poor disenfranchised Georgetown alumni out there in the cold and dark.
“Police, Fire Reportedly Refused to Respond to Crime in Progress in Seattle’s Breakaway CHOP.” “This is where ‘defund the police’ will lead not just in Seattle, but wherever it’s thoughtlessly implemented. Probably not all the way to the segregationist, secessionist CHOP, but to crime-ridden streets into which police and fire are more circumspect about intervening.”
these riots and their associated melodrama might most accurately be called the Nov. 3 riots. It’s the prospect of the election, especially the possibility that President Donald Trump will be reelected, which provides the fuel for the current hysteria.
But Simon is right. A solid majority of voters are disgusted by what they see. There is a large overdraft on the country’s budget of white guilt. Expect a foreclosure on the account Nov. 3. Yes, yes, the situation is fluid and a week, as Harold Wilson once observed, is a long time in politics. But a biopsy of the body politic in mid-June 2020 doesn’t bode well for the old man in the basement or scriptwriters Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
The longer this madness continues, the more likely it is that the president will enjoy a victory of historic proportions.
Another caveat about all those “Oh my God, Wuhan coronavirus cases are spiking in Florida,” etc. stories, take a look at these statistics. Assuming they’re accurate (a big assumption), new cases are going up (not spiking per se), but deaths are going down. It really looks like cases aren’t spiking, we’re just detecting milder and milder cases of it thanks to widespread testing.
Instead of #BlackLivesMatters, how about actually defending black lives? “National African American Gun Association (NAAGA) Membership Grows as Members Purchase Ammo in Record Numbers.” Good. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
Good news in a sea of bad: Austin Police Chief Brian Manley is not getting the axe. Finally, a scalp the radical left didn’t take.
Antifa members arrested in Austin for looting. “Lisa Hogan, Samuel Miller, and Skye Elder were arrested last week and charged with various state jail felonies after they smashed into a boarded-up Target, destroyed and ripped out surveillance cameras, and looted the store, stealing and damaging over $20,000 in property.” The mugshot:
Exactly the sort of Antifa winners you would expect to loot a Target
Chuck-E-Cheese files for bankruptcy. When they had to make it on the quality of their food, they were doomed…
Also filing for bankruptcy: 24 Hour Fitness. Hard to make a living when the government outlaws your business model. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Rocket fuel storage facility explosion in #China, the air catches fire before the explosion, the orange smoke is a clear indication of rocket fuel. The Shockwave shatters the glass of the nearby textile mill. You will not find this story on Chinese "news"
Uncle Hugo's Bookstore engulfed. I went to this place a couple times and the owner was kind and made good recommendations. RIP. ☹️ pic.twitter.com/OrHJNG5g1w
In Atlanta, the CNN building was heavily vandalized. Other businesses were vandalized and looted, police cars were set on fire and the College Football Hall of Fame looted. Rapper Killer Mike has some thoughts:
Killer Mike confronts CNN for stoking the fire that led to their Atlanta HQ being invaded and trashed:
Fires have been started in the street in downtown Portland. This is a repeat of the antifa riots after Trump won election in 2016. #BlackLivesMatter#antifa#GeorgeFloyd
Dallas wasn’t spared, with downtown and the club-filled Deep Ellum area attacked, at least one police car burned.
In Houston, damage appeared to be less severe, possibly because 200 people were arrested for trying to block a roadway. Some broken glass, but I’m not seeing reports of arson. As always, judiciously applied lawful force tends to nip rioting in the bud.
Don’t believe for a second the laughable “white supremacists did this” talking point the left is trying to foist on the public:
I went thru the Hennepin Sheriff arrest log. Of the 25 arrested for rioting, only 3 were out of state. None of those 3 had supremacy leanings on social media. All hated Trump. One was a Bernie supporter. One posted on FB of going out to protest.
Some of these narratives right now being spouted by major media personalities are bananas. I certainly wouldn't rule out the possibility some kind of White Supremacist agitators at the riots. But you have to be willfully blind to pretend Antifa's not there and causing problems.
The question remains: What do hard-left and antifa/#BlackLivesMatters backers like George Soros hope to gain through backing such riots?
🚨🚨 There's only one reason there's protests at the Whitehouse tonight & other cities in America & it has nothing to do with George Floyd or the #Minneapolisprotests. It's because George Soros paid & sent them there. Retweet if you agree this is an old story. INVESTIGATE THAT pic.twitter.com/Hkfw948DwA
Trump has, however, suggested that he may well go the emergency route if Pelosi and Schumer remain intransigent: “We can call a national emergency. I haven’t done it. I may do it.… It’s another way of doing it.” The standard line trotted out by the Democrats and the media when the President alludes to an emergency declaration is that a phalanx of pettifoggers will contrive to tie it up in the courts indefinitely. This has even been repeated by conservative pundits. According to Professor Turley, however, “Courts generally have deferred to the judgments of presidents on the basis for such national emergencies, and dozens of such declarations have been made without serious judicial review.”
All of which means that there is no practical way for the Democrats to stop Trump from getting his wall. He will make a sound, statesmanlike case for it to the nation during the State of the Union address — just 10 days before the deadline to avoid another shutdown. Nancy Pelosi will be scowling behind him, still smarting from the beating she received in the polls from the last shutdown and the hectoring to which she has no doubt been subjected from vulnerable members whose constituents are tired of, “NO.” Then, failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams will deliver the Dem SOTU response and characterize Trump’s wall using the usual tired clichés about racism.
In other words, Trump will have been presidential. He will have delivered all manner of good news about the economy, deregulation, health care, foreign policy, and will have laid out a plan for the wall. The Democrats will have offered identity politics, obstruction, investigations, and magical thinking on policy. Pelosi will at length decide it’s smarter to ignore the crazies in her caucus, give Trump something that he can call a “win” on the wall, and move on to something else… anything else. And all the TDS victims and Never Trumpers will demand to know what happened to their bête noire.
Old and Busted: “Neither snow nor rain, nor gloom of night, shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” The New Coldness: Mail delivery in Minnesota cancelled due to cold.
In fact, with all of this year after year of the HOTTEST YEAR EVER, no state has set a highest temperature record is more than 20 years. In fact, most (39 out of 50) state highest temperature records were set quite long ago – over 50 years ago, sometimes as long ago as 1888 (!).
Stop and think about that – if the science were as settled as people say, wouldn’t there be at least one state that set an all time high record recently? What a strange warming that raises average temperatures but not record high temperatures.
“A shocking report from the Texas Secretary of State last week revealed 95,000 individuals identified in the Texas Department of Public Safety database as non-U.S. citizens have registered to vote in Texas — and 58,000 of those have voted in one or more Texas election since 1996.”
Texans may enjoy real property tax reform soon. It’s amazing what can be accomplished when you have a speaker working for conservative goals, rather than against them…
In April 2013, it was reported that BuzzFeed’s investment was $46 million, which means they’ve attracted about $450 million in new capital over the past six years — despite having never shown a profit!
BuzzFeed has been burning through cash at a rate of $75 million a year and you might think that at some point their investors would become impatient waiting for this operation to show some prospect of making a return on their investment.
“The Navy’s costliest warship, the $13 billion Gerald R. Ford, had 20 failures of its aircraft launch-and-landing systems during operations at sea, according to the Pentagon’s testing office.” There’s a reason they have shakedown cruises, and I think there’s a good chance they’ll work out the bugs and get the electromagnetic catapult systems working properly. But at $13 billion, the cost-benefit analysis of additional aircraft carriers starts to get very tricky vs. say, four cheaper ships capable of launching 1,000 semi-autonomous drones each. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Now, Tom Wolfe was a genuine intellectual — he had a Ph.D. from Princeton, for crying out loud — but he was also a Southerner, a native of Virginia, and unlike so many other journalists who have written about the South, he had sympathy for the people he wrote about. He wasn’t out to write an exposé or to do what is nowadays called “investigative journalism,” but sought to explain the folkways of small-town Appalachia to the urban sophisticates who read Esquire, to make the reader see how wholesome and quintessentially American these people really were.
If you want to know why nobody gives a damn about magazines like Esquire anymore, it’s because the progressive politics of the 21st century forbid any sympathy for the kind of people who like NASCAR. Everything in big-league journalism now is about left-wing politics, more or less, and because North Carolina rednecks probably aren’t too excited about the Left’s agenda of open borders and transgender rights and all that, there is zero possibility a latter-day Tom Wolfe could get any New York-based magazine to publish an article like “The Last American Hero.”
The whole thing is basically a celebration of toxic masculinity, as the Gender Studies majors would say. Junior Johnson was not one of these “sensitive” modern guys, but a big muscular fellow who thrived on ferocious competition in one of the most masculine of sports.
He also quotes part of my favorite passage from Wolfe’s celebrated essay, about courage being one of Appalachia’s exportable commodities:
In the Korean War, not a very heroic performance by American soldiers generally, there were seventy-eight Medal of Honor winners. Thirty-nine of them were from the South, and practically all of the thirty-nine were from small towns in or near the Appalachians. The New York metropolitan area, which has more people than all these towns put together, had three Medal of Honor winners, and one of them had just moved to New York from the Appalachian region of West Virginia. Three of the Medal of Honor winners came from within fifty miles of Junior Johnson’s side porch.
The week between Christmas and New Years is always odd. Work slows down with so many people on vacation, but there’s always a personal rush to get things done before the end of the year.
If you want to see what a bunch of half-baked idiots and kettle-corn psalmists in a political march are up to, the easiest thing to do is to march around with them, as I did for a while in Portland. I do not look much like Tucker Carlson, and I remain, for the moment, able to blend in with such groups.
Which I did — and a funny thing happened: As the march began to peter out, a group of Antifa loitered for a bit on a street corner, and I loitered with them for a while, observing. And then I got tired and decided to bring my labors to an end and go on my merry. As I walked off, a contingent, apparently believing that we were once again on the move against fascism, began to follow me, pumping their fists and chanting, until they figured out that I wasn’t leading them anywhere. And thus did a National Review correspondent end up briefly leading an Antifa march through Portland.
Of course they followed me. They’ll follow anything that moves.
There has never been any vacuum in Syria (or Iraq). Sharia supremacism fills all voids. In focusing on ISIS, David discounts sharia supremacism as “an idea.” But it is much more than that. It is a cultural distinction — even, as Samuel Huntington argued, a civilizational one. It will always be a forcible enemy of the West. It doesn’t matter what the groups are called. You can kill ISIS, but it is already reforming as something else. In fact, it may no longer even be the strongest jihadist force in Syria: Its forebear-turned-rival al-Qaeda is ascendant — after a few name changes (the latest is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Levant Liberation Organization) and some infighting with other militant upstarts. There is a better chance that ISIS will reestablish ties with the mothership than fade away.
The fact that al-Qaeda, which triggered the “War on Terror,” does not factor into American clamoring about Syria is telling. The anti-ISIS mission David describes was not always the U.S. objective in Syria. First we were going to pull an Iraq/Libya redux and help the “moderates” overthrow Assad. But the “moderates,” in the main, are Muslim Brotherhood groups that are very content to align with al-Qaeda jihadists — and our fabulous allies in Syria, the Turks and the Saudis, were only too happy to abet al-Qaeda. Syria had thus become such a conundrum that we were effectively aligning with the very enemies who had provoked us into endless regional war.
When ISIS arose and gobbled up territory, beheading some inhabitants and enslaving the rest, Obama began sending in small increments of troops to help our “moderate” allies fend them off. But the moderates are mostly impotent; they need the jihadists, whether they are fighting rival jihadists or Assad. Syria remains a multi-front conflict in which one “axis” of America’s enemies, Assad-Iran-Russia, is pitted against another cabal of America’s enemies, the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda factions; both sides flit between fighting against and attempting to co-opt ISIS, another U.S. enemy. The fighting may go on for years; the prize the winner gets is . . . Syria (if it’s the Russians, they’ll wish they were back in Afghanistan).
Degrading ISIS into irrelevance would not degrade anti-American jihadism in Syria into irrelevance. If sharia didn’t ban alcohol, I’d say the old wine would just appear in new bottles. It was, moreover, absurd for President Trump to declare victory just because ISIS has been stripped of 95 percent of the territory it once held. Caliphate aspirations notwithstanding, ISIS’s mistake was the attempt to be an open and notorious sovereign. It was always more effective as a terrorist underground, and it still has tens of thousands of operatives for that purpose.
If we stayed out of the way, America’s enemies would continue killing each other. That’s fine by me. I am not indifferent to collateral human suffering, but it is a staple of sharia-supremacist societies; we can no more prevent it in Syria than in Burkina Faso. And I am not indifferent to the challenge David rightly identifies: terrorists occupying safe havens from which they can plot against the West. But that is a global challenge, and we handle it elsewhere by vigilant intelligence-gathering and quick-strike capabilities. We should hit terrorist sanctuaries wherever we find them, but it is not necessary to have thousands of American troops on the ground everyplace such sanctuaries might take root.
Trump campaigned on his promise to build a wall. He told Frisco Nancy and Chuck Odd that he would shut down the government if he didn’t get his wall money. The Republican establishment, which does not really want a wall because the GOP corporate donor class doesn’t want to turn off the spigot of cheap foreign peasant labor even though those illegals are all future Democrat voters, led Trump on and on. They put continuing resolution after continuing resolution in front of him, each time promising to really, truly, cross-my-heart-and-hope-you-die fight next time. He gave them a chance. He gave them too many chances. And they expected he’d go along again this time. But conservatives drew the line and Trump realized that he needed to do what he did best to get back inside the ruling class’s decision cycle.
He needed to disrupt, so he kept his promise. He refused to play along with the wall scam anymore. And the gleeful Dem senators singing carols as they expected to get away with another grift ended their serenade with a sad trombone. Now the government is going to shut down, and Trump has zero to lose by holding out.
Then he cranked up the disruption when he announced he was getting out of Syria, and it’s clear that Afghanistan is probably next. The establishment reacted with surprise and horror. It’s hard to understand the “surprise” part, since he campaigned on getting us the hell out of foreign hellholes and has always wanted to. Again, he played along, giving the establishment a chance. And another. And nothing happened. So now he’s done. He’s doing what he promised.
Is this withdrawal a good idea? That depends – we definitely need to provide for the safety of our Kurdish allies, and how that will happen remains unclear at this writing. ISIS is a danger; departing necessarily accepts risk. While the conservative anti-nation building attitude is blind to our successes doing it (like in Kosovo), neither Syria nor Afghanistan seem particularly fertile soil for it. And who is eager to dump more money into them after all the trillions we’ve wasted since 2001?
But beyond the substantive considerations is the fact that the overwrought reaction of the establishment to the idea of actually ending a war supports Trump’s plan. What is our objective anyway? What’s the endstate? In the War College they taught us we should have those things. But the screamers never tell us – instead, it’s always invective about how we love Putin, or how we are stupid or whatever, when we ask, “Okay, how much more in time, money and American lives should we devote to these projects?” We never get a timeline, or a dollar figure, or the number of coffins that they consider whatever their unarticulated objective happens to be is worth.
We keep hearing ISIS might return and we have to stay to stamp out those creeps again, and fine, killing jihadists is cool, but if the goal is to keep Mideastern jerks from being themselves then we will never, ever leave. The elite always denies it wants us to be the world’s policemen, but then it always demands that we keep walking a beat that never ends.
President Trump hasn’t destroyed free trade, he’s split it into two: One set of trading partners for us and our allies, and another set for China:
The status quo with China is crumbling. Businesses have grown disillusioned with China’s restrictions on their activities, forced technology transfer and intellectual-property theft, all aimed at building up domestic competitors at foreign expense. Meanwhile, legislators in both parties are alarmed at increased military assertiveness and domestic repression under President Xi Jinping.
Dan Sullivan, a Republican senator from Alaska, personifies these broader forces reshaping the U.S. approach to the world. Mr. Sullivan has followed the rise of China for decades—as a Marine sent to the Taiwan Strait in 1996 in a response to Chinese provocations; as an official in George W. Bush’s National Security Council and State Department; and for a time as Alaska’s commissioner of natural resources.
When Mr. Xi visited the U.S. in 2015, Mr. Sullivan urged his colleagues to pay more attention to China’s rise. On the Senate floor, he quoted the political scientist Graham Allison: “War between the U.S. and China is more likely than recognized at the moment.”
Last spring, Mr. Sullivan went to China and met officials including Vice President Wang Qishan. They seemed to think tensions with the U.S. will fade after Mr. Trump leaves the scene, Mr. Sullivan recalled.
“I just said, ‘You are completely misreading this.’” The mistrust, he told them, is bipartisan, and will outlast Mr. Trump.
While delivering one message to China, Mr. Sullivan gave a different one to the administration and its trade negotiators: Don’t alienate allies needed to take on China.
“Modernize the agreements but stay within the agreements,” he says he counseled them. “Then we have to turn to the really big geostrategic challenge facing our country and that’s China.”
His was one voice among many urging Mr. Trump to single out China for pressure. Presidents Obama and George W. Bush sought to change China’s behavior through dialogue and engagement. Obama officials had begun to question engagement by the end of the administration. Last year, in its National Security Strategy, the Trump administration declared engagement a failure.
The Trump administration regards economic policy and national security as inseparable when it comes to Beijing, because China’s acquisition of Western technology both strengthens China militarily and weakens the U.S. economically.
“We don’t like it when our allies steal our ideas either, but it’s a much less dangerous situation,” said Derek Scissors, a China expert at the American Enterprise Institute whose views align with the administration’s more hawkish officials. “We’re not worried about the war-fighting capability of Japan and Korea because they’re our friends.”
Snip.
Michael Pillsbury, a Hudson Institute scholar close to the Trump team who has long warned of China’s strategic threat, sees three plausible scenarios. At one extreme is a new cold war with drastically curtailed economic ties. At the other, the U.S. and China resolve their tensions, continue to integrate and run the world together.
Between those extremes, Mr. Pillsbury sees a more likely and desirable middle path—a transactional U.S.-China relationship of the sort that prevailed during the 1980s in which the two decide, case by case, when to do business and when to decouple.
Stray thought: With the U.S. disengagement with various Middle Eastern conflicts, there’s a possibility that the less-Trump Derangement Syndrome-besotted ranks of the neocons might pivot to back Trump against China. After all, there was no end to neocon Jeremiads against China prior to the 2016 election…
These reporters can’t even begin a news account of a presidential visit to a military base without working in a compilation of Mr. Trump’s controversies, contradictions, and failings.
The point isn’t to feel sorry for Mr. Trump, whose rhetorical attacks on the press have often been contemptible. The point is that such gratuitously negative reporting undermines the credibility of the press without Mr. Trump having to say a word.
Speaking of scumbag sexual abusers, Kevin Spacey has finally been indicted for sexual assault. The one tiny bright spot is that it was an 18-year old man, so it’s slightly less reprehensible than the statutory rate charges made against him. [Insert innocent until proven guilty disclaimer here.]
Shocking news: Washington Post readers actually blame the illegal alien father who brought his son along as a pawn in his plan to enter the U.S., only to see him die. “Reading these comments, I believe the American culture has changed radically since the fall of 2016, when Trump was painted as a racist for saying the situation at the border had to change. I think, for all the press resistance to Trump’s fight against illegal immigration, minds have changed.”
Speaking of Brit Hume: Six days after hip replacement surgery and he’s already walking around:
Wonders of modern medicine: Here I am just six days after my right hip was replaced. I’m still sore, but so grateful for the work of Dr. Anthony Unger and his team at Sibley Memorial Hospital in D.C. Merry Christmas indeed! pic.twitter.com/onB87keKtT
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I for one am stuffed…
For those freaking out about Chief Justice Roberts saying there are no Democratic or Republican judges…¯\_(ツ)_/¯. He’s the head of a co-equal branch of the United States federal government, of course he’s going to defend the institutional independence of the court, no matter the evidence to the contrary. It’s pretty much required for his position.
Now here’s a LinkSwarm to enjoy before girding your loins to do battle over a $99 stereo marked down to $69…
Future historians will have to reconstruct exactly how and why the tipping point has been reached, but the ACLU’s actions over the last couple of months show that the ACLU is no longer a civil libertarian organization in any meaningful sense, but just another left-wing pressure group, albeit one with a civil libertarian history.
First, the ACLU ran an anti-Brett Kavanaugh video ad that relied entirely on something that no committed civil libertarian would countenance, guilt by association. And not just guilt by association, but guilt by association with individuals that Kavanaugh wasn’t actually associated with in any way, except that they were all men who like Kavanaugh had been accused of serious sexual misconduct. The literal point of the ad is that Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby were accused of sexual misconduct, they denied it but were actually guilty; therefore, Brett Kavanaugh, also having been accused of sexual misconduct, and also having denied it, is likely guilty too.
Can you imagine back in the 1950s the ACLU running an ad with the theme, “Earl Warren has been accused of being a Communist. He denies it. But Alger Hiss and and Julius Rosenberg were also accused of being Communists, they denied it, but they were lying. So Earl Warren is likely lying, too?”
Meanwhile, yesterday, the Department of Education released a proposed new Title IX regulation that provides for due process rights for accused students that had been prohibited by Obama-era guidance. Shockingly, even to those of us who have followed the ACLU’s long, slow decline, the ACLU tweeted in reponse that the proposed regulation “promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused.” Even longtime ACLU critics are choking on the ACLU, of all organizations, claiming that due process protections “inappropriately favor the accuse.”
The ACLU had a clear choice between the identitarian politics of the feminist hard left, and retaining some semblance of its traditional commitment to fair process. It chose the former. And that along with the Kavanaugh ad signals the final end of the ACLU as we knew it. RIP.
Having moved his flock to northern California in the 1960s, Jones began leveraging their labor toward political ends, volunteering them for protests or electioneering on behalf of friendly aspirants to public office. Gaining the respect of San Francisco’s political class, Jones became a player in his own right. Many gave him credit for Moscone’s tight victory in the 1975 mayoral runoff, and he was appointed head of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Praised as a hero of social justice and a crusader for racial equality, Jones became an important figure in Democratic politics.
Among his advocates was Harvey Milk, also a newcomer to San Francisco. Milk, formerly a Goldwater Republican, became politically radical in California and repeatedly sought election to office as an outsider to the political machine. Milk attended services at Peoples Temple dozens of times, and wrote effusive letters to Jones. “Such greatness I have found in Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple,” Milk proclaimed.
Milk wasn’t Jones’s only fan. Many powerful people—Governor Jerry Brown, columnist Herb Caen, and Vice President Walter Mondale, to name a few—sought Jones’s blessings and expressed admiration for his dedication to racial equality and a better world. Flynn does a good job of laying out the social and political landscape of the Bay Area in the late seventies and situating the bizarre respect that the Jones cult received within the general fruitiness of the era. Jim Jones’s Bay Area was the same milieu that gave rise to the Zodiac killer, the lost-in-time Zebra murders, and the depredations of the Symbionese Liberation Army. In that context, a wacky preacher who healed the sick and ran drug-treatment centers while promising a racially unified heaven on earth seemed like a salutary influence by comparison.
Snip.
Jim Jones’s connection to mainstream Democratic politics has been suppressed. He and the Peoples Temple, which exalted racial diversity and social justice, have been cast as harrowing examples of Christian religious extremism, though Jones preached atheism and ordered his followers to use the Bible as toilet paper. A roster of leaders who remain dominant figures in California politics today embraced Jones publically. Jerry Brown, then and now governor of the state, approvingly visited the Peoples Temple, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who ascended to the mayoralty upon Moscone’s assassination, joined the Board of Supervisors in honoring Jones. Willie Brown, longtime speaker of the California state assembly, a mayor of San Francisco, and the mentor of Senator Kamala Harris, was especially lavish in his praise of Jones, calling him “a combination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Chairman Mao.”
So Jamal Khashoggi – a former Saudi intelligence agent, a man who was close to the Muslim Brotherhood and a sworn opponent of MBS’ reform program– was in the process of setting up a centre to promote the ideology of the MB. He was setting it up in Turkey with Qatari money. The Saudis wanted to stop him. In September they offered him $9 million to return to Saudi Arabia and to live there unhindered. They wanted him out of play. Khashoggi refused and the rest you know. The Saudis killed him.
Let me make two points. First, there is no justification for murdering Khashoggi. Secondly, this man wasn’t some Western-oriented liberal brutally murdered because of his passion for freedom. This man was a player.
Laura Loomer banned from Twitter. I have had zero interactions with Ms. Loomer, and she sounds like quite a piece of work, but banning her for criticizing a Muslim politician for supporting female genital mutilation is asinine.
Dear God, did the Senate Democrats’ strategy on Brett Kavanaugh backfire on them on an epic scale. I do think that before the Kavanaugh fight, the Democrats were on the path to that “Blue Tsunami.” And then they decided that rerunning the Neil Gorsuch fight wasn’t going to be enough; they had to fully embrace a bunch of accusations that had no supporting witnesses.
Claire McCaskill, gone. Finally. I laid out her devilish luck in yesterday’s Jolt; for at least twelve years, Missouri Republicans yearned for a chance to take her on in a relatively normal political environment with a candidate who wasn’t a walking Superfund site of toxicity. Lo and behold, with no political wind at her back, no good GOP rivals being knocked out by the political equivalent of anvils falling from buildings or alien abductions, Josh Hawley won . . . by about 144,000 votes. The old “Vote liberal for four or five years, veer back to the center in election years” strategy of red-state Democrats finally stopped working.
Taylor Swift could not deliver Tennessee for Phil Bredesen. In retrospect, the hype around the former governor looks like wishful thinking on the part of Democrats. He last won a statewide race in 2006, and as soon as Marsha Blackburn nationalized this race, it was over. Blackburn won by about 245,000 votes last night. You figure that Democrats will have a hard time recruiting a top-tier candidate anytime soon.
Rick Scott won in Florida! Never underestimate this man again. If aliens invade Florida in 2022, Scott will lead the forces of humanity to a narrow upset victory, because that’s what he does every four years — win something that nobody thinks he has a chance to win, by about one percent. Florida Democrats will console themselves that it was so close, but with the high turnout, four-tenths of a percentage point comes out to . . . about 34,000 votes. After the 2000 presidential election, that’s a Florida landslide.
As of this writing, Mike Braun is on pace to win Indiana’s Senate by 10 points, or about 189,000 votes. A lot of people are pointing to this result as a polling failure, but remember that because of Indiana’s strict anti-robocall laws, pollsters survey this state less frequently because they have to use live interviewers. The lesson here is, trust your instincts! A GOP candidate in a longtime Republican-leaning state, the home state of the current vice president, up against a Democrat who won with 50 percent in a presidential year and who votes against Kavanaugh a month before Election Day . . . has a really good chance to win and win comfortably.
Face it, we’re not even that upset that Joe Manchin won in West Virginia. His victory offers the lesson that any red-state Democrat could have improved their chances for reelection by voting for Brett Kavanaugh.
We should give Beto O’Rourke a bit of credit; coming within three points is better than any Democrat running statewide in Texas since . . . Ann Richards, I think? But that’s . . . not a victory, which is a fair expectation when you raise $70 million and spend $60 million. And because of the scale of the turnout, those three points amount to 213,750 votes. Turnout was more than 8.3 million votes, and I recall seeing O’Rourke fans insisting that if turnout surpassed 8 million votes, then their man was certain to win. Guys, there are a lot of Republicans in Texas.
Bad: Nancy Pelosi as Speaker again. Good: Getting to run against Nancy Pelosi again, since she’s now the highest ranking elected Democrat in the country.
I am happy to see the admirable Senator Ted Cruz reelected in Texas, where you can almost buy a Senate race but not quite. I like Senator Cruz a great deal (and I like him even more when he’s not campaigning) but I’d have enjoyed watching a reasonably well-qualified ham sandwich defeat Robert Francis O’Rourke, one of the most insipid and puffed-up figures on the American political scene.
Snip.
The Democrats have gone well and truly ’round the bend. I spent a fair part of last night with Democrats in Portland, Ore. — admittedly, a pretty special bunch of Democrats, Portland being Portland and all. The professional political operators are what they always are — by turns cynical and sanctimonious — but the rank and file seem to actually believe the horsepucky they’ve been fed, i.e., that these United States are about two tweets away from cattle cars and concentration camps. The level of paranoia among the people I spoke to was remarkable.
Fourth, and related: The Democrats don’t seem to understand what it is they are really fighting, which, in no small part, is not the Republicans but the constitutional architecture of the United States. The United States is, as the name suggests, a union of states, which have interests, powers, and characters of their own. They are not administrative subdivisions of the federal government. All that talk about winning x percent of the “national House vote” or the “national Senate vote” — neither of which, you know, exists — is a backhanded way of getting at the fact that they do not like how our governments are organized, and that they would prefer a more unitary national government under which the states are so subordinated as to be effectively inconsequential. They complain that, under President Trump, “the Constitution is hanging by a thread” — but they don’t really much care for the actual order established by that Constitution, and certainly not for the limitations it puts on government power through the Bill of Rights and other impediments to étatism.
“Noun. etatism (usually uncountable, plural etatisms) Total control of the state over individual citizens.”
Overall, Republicans had a tough night Tuesday. When all is said and done, Democrats look to have gained around 35 seats in the House, seven governorships and over 330 state legislators. Yet as rough as it was, it could have been much worse for Republicans. In Barack Obama’s first mid-term in 2010, Republicans picked up 63 House seats and 700 state legislative seats — numbers that were not out of the question for Democrats for a large portion of this cycle. In the Senate, Republicans actually expanded their majority — as it appears they will pick up 3 seats — whereas Democrats lost 6 seats in the 2010 midterms.
In many ways, it was a strange election. If you had told me in August that Democrats were going to win more than 30 House seats, I would have bet a large amount of money that the Senate would also be in play. I would have a difficult time accepting that Florida would elect Ron DeSantis governor and (as it now appears) Rick Scott as senator. The notion that Ohio’s Senate race would fall into the mid-single digits, that Mike DeWine would win the Ohio governor’s race handily, or that Michigan’s Senate race would be decided by fewer than seven points all would have seemed ludicrous. Martha McSally keeping Arizona close (and possibly winning) would not seem possible.
Snip.
1. The GOP got killed in the suburbs. We can place Republican losses into three broad buckets: “perennial swing seats” (Colorado’s 6th, Arizona’s 2nd), “sleeping/problematic candidates” (Oklahoma’s 5th, South Carolina’s 1st), and suburban districts. This last category is by far the broadest, and it accounts for around two-thirds of the Republicans’ losses. This is a significant long-term problem for the party if it continues.
2. This probably doesn’t count as a wave. If you look at the Index I referenced on Monday, our preliminary results suggest that things have moved about 23 points toward Democrats. That’s a substantial shift, but it falls short of even “semi-wave elections” such as 2014 (a shift of 26 points toward Republicans) and 2006 (a movement of 30 points toward Democrats). Obviously, as results trickle in this might shift further, but probably not by much.
2. Money. One of the ways to resolve the tension between what we saw in the House versus the Senate (and to a lesser extent, governorships) is that Democrats had a massive fundraising advantage in the lower chamber. This allowed them to catch a number of incumbent Republicans napping, and to spread the playing field out such that the GOP just had too many brush fires to put out. Oklahoma’s 5th Congressional District, for example, flipped in part because Michael Bloomberg’s team spent $400,000 on the air in the final week of the election. To the extent we wish to deduce anything about 2020 from these midterms, we should bear in mind that the next election will probably be fought on a more even financial playing field.
Snip.
This all takes place against the backdrop of a booming economy. Finally, it is important to note that Republicans should not have found themselves in this position amid a vibrant economy. It is quite unusual to have a result this bad in a time of peace and prosperity. Some of this is the suburban realignment, but some is driven by Donald Trump’s more extreme actions, which alienate suburban moderates.
On the other hand, if Trump can smooth out the rougher edges that turn suburbanites off, he could prove to be a formidable candidate in 2020. Most of his states from 2016 continued to support Republicans this cycle. But, on the other hand, he hasn’t shown much interest in smoothing out those edges. And if the economy slides into recession, all bets are off.
While Tuesday night was not a complete win for Republicans, there was no blue wave, either. By most measures, Republicans beat the odds of history and nearly everyone’s expectations, while Democrats were left disappointed as the fantasy of Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Gillum, Stacey Abrams and others winning fizzled. Not one new progressive Democrat was successful bursting onto the scene. It will take a few days to process the meaning of this year’s election returns, but the instant analysis is clear: Democrats may have won the House, but Trump won the election.
Let’s look at what won’t be happening, despite the fever dreams of the Democrats. First, there will be no big ticket legislative packages going through. No major immigration reform supporting the highest priorities of either party. No new tax cuts, but also no tax increases. No new gun control legislation. The fact is, these folks will be lucky if they can name a new Post Office.
The President isn’t going to be impeached. The Democrats would need to round up every one of their members in the House to get the ball rolling and too many of them are on record saying that would be too extreme. And even if they managed it in the House there is zero chance of a conviction in the Senate. Donald Trump will finish his first term at a minimum.
The wall isn’t going to be finished. That’s somehow become a badge of honor among Democrats, despite being one of the most doable solutions to immigration problems imaginable. If we’re going to get any money at all for additional wall construction, the new House majority will want a massive pound of flesh in return.
Kurt Schlicter: “Look For Democrats To Blow Their Meager Success By Being Jerks”:
No, they want all #resistance, all of the time, and they are going to do everything they can to appease their looney base by launching investigations and screaming and yelling. That’s not going to help the newbies keep those new House seats in 2020. It’s going to be especially funny when all these rookies who promised the suckers back home they would never vote for that San Francisco liberal monster get strong-armed into casting their very first vote for Mistress Nancy.
And if they decide to obstruct and agitate, then Trump can be in opposition to them and run against the do-nothing House in 2020. Nobody is better than Trump when he has an enemy. I’m kind of hoping the Democrats choose the path of jerkiness just for the nicknames he’ll bestow in his tweets.
Oh, and please, impeach him over Russia Treason Traitor stuff. Please. Toss the Trump in that briar patch and he’ll be president forever.
The national media portrayed Trump as a weight on Republicans. In fact, he was their source of energy. Had the Florida GOP been ambivalent about Trump and kept him out of the state, Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott would have lost. Journalists mocked DeSantis for “tying himself to Trump,” but they now fall silent as it becomes clear that that was perhaps his only winning strategy.
The press propagandized relentlessly for Gillum, who was flush with money from George Soros and Tom Steyer, while kneecapping the scrappier DeSantis over minor lapses, and Gillum still couldn’t win. Notice also the media’s silence about Obama. Yet again the darling of journalists shows himself to be a crappy campaigner for others. In his narcissistic shade nothing grows.
The media’s excited talk of a “blue wave” in Florida never struck me as very convincing as I walked around various cities in Florida. The media’s giddy keenness for Gillum was never reflected in any of the conversations I ever heard. In mid-October, I walked around the Volusia County mall in a MAGA hat as an experiment to test the media’s claims of a spreading anti-Trump backlash. Nobody seemed to care in the slightest. In fact, a self-described independent who said that he “had voted for Jimmy Carter” made a point of walking over to me as I sat in the mall’s food court to express his support for Trump’s policies. “I didn’t vote for him,” he said, “but he is delivering results.”
Dems are currently up 30 seats in the House, which puts them up to 225.
