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LinkSwarm for May 29, 2020

Friday, May 29th, 2020

Minneapolis burns, coronavirus fades, and North Korean dictators can’t teleport. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Over 50 buildings were burned, looted or damaged in Minneapolis over rioting in response to the death of George Floyd.
  • Lots of people suggesting that antifa as well as #BlackLivesMatter were involved:

    It seems that every four years the leftwing media complex manufactures another race riot. Who benefits? Do they think they can prevent an erosion of black voters to Trump by playing the “Racist cops!” card from now until election day? That backfired spectacularly in 2016. Minnesota went narrowly to Hillary Clinton in 2016; did they just ensure that it will now flip to Trump? Is that the preferred outcome, so the insane wing can seize control of the Democratic Party from the corrupt wing?

  • What? “A former club owner in south Minneapolis says the now-fired police officer and the black man who died in his custody this week both worked security for her club up to the end of last year.” I don’t think anyone had that on their bingo card.
  • Ode to the Roof Koreans. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Good news from the CDC:

    According to the CDC’s current best estimate, the case fatality rate of the coronavirus is .4 percent. And that’s just amongst symptomatic cases, which, the CDC estimates, is 65 percent of all cases. This means the CDC estimates that the fatality rate for all infections across all age groups, symptomatic as well as asymptomatic, is approximately .26 percent.

    The CDC does caution that the numbers are likely to change with new data, but considering we’ve gone from 3.4 percent to 2.0 percent to now 0.26 percent. The more data we get, the lower the numbers get. So, I’m thinking it might get even lower.

    But, the bigger takeaway from this is that the early doomsday predictions about the coronavirus were all wrong. Everything that justified the lockdowns and the shutting down of our economy was wrong. We need to open this country back up.

  • More on that theme:

    There appears to be no statistical connection between the economic pain of the nationwide shutdowns and the number of COVID-19 cases or fatalities. None. Let that sink in for a moment, given we were told we had to lock down America to “flatten the curve” and save lives.

    On the other hand, the data does suggest that reliance on mass transit is connected with virus cases and fatalities.

    Snip.

    There appears to be no statistical connection between improved health outcomes and pandemic policies that forced nearly 40 million people into the unemployment lines. None.

    One might expect to see that states that suffered the most in COVID cases or fatalities would also be the states with the highest increases in unemployment as politicians and public health officials in those areas instituted strict measures to slow the disease. Alternatively, states that hadn’t seen much in the way of the virus should be relatively better off economically.

    Among the 15 most-populous states, New York has the highest COVID case rate, the highest death rate, and the highest age-adjusted death rate, while its unemployment rate jumped 10.8 percent from February to April.

    At the other end of the spectrum, Texas has the lowest case rate, the lowest death rate, and the lowest age-adjusted death rate among the 15 most-populous states. Texas’ unemployment rate increased 9.3 percent over the past two months reported.

    But New York City’s mass transit probably was a key contributing factor.

  • Norway believes that the lockdown was unnecessary. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Andrew Cuomo gave immunity to nursing home execs after big campaign donations.” Because being part of the Democratic Money Complex means never having to admit you’re guilty…
  • No one trusts the media on the Wuhan Coronavirus. Gee, wonder why… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Tucker Carlson reveals the truth about voting fraud:

    For the first time ever, Twitter.com, the company responded directly to one of the president’s tweets. They inserted a link below this one to declare authoritatively that the tweet was false. “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.” If the user has taken to a Twitter news page with a headline declaring “Trump makes the unsubstantiated claim that mail-in voting will lead to voter fraud.” That’s the official story. Voter fraud never happens no matter what, and it definitely won’t happen with mail-in voting. You are hearing trusted news anchors tell you that, a lot. And they say it like they know it. Anyone who disagrees is a conspiracy nut, a flat Earther, a freak. Probably doesn’t vaccinate his kids.

    They’re lying. That’s a lie and we know it’s a lie because of fraud at mail-in voting already happens. Not speculating. Do you have Google? Look it up. Ballot harvesting is the problem. Ballot harvesting is the process when the third-party collects and turns in ballots on behalf of another person. It’s only possible with mail-in ballots.

    Laws around ballot harvesting vary from state to state. It’s currently legal in 27 states but Democrats want to legalize it in all 50, and, I wonder why. The recent House coronavirus bill declares that “all states” must permit a voter to designate any person to deliver a sealed absentee ballot. The only restriction is ballot harvesters can not be paid based on the number of ballots they collect, but of course, you could easily pay that than a campaign could pay a canvasser for their time or the distance they travel.

    With unlimited ballot harvesting, there is no state supervision or chain of custody, to limit on the amount of ballots a single person can collect. Ballot harvesters can go to people’s homes, and they do in California. They pressure them to vote or vote the right way, or they help a person read through a ballot while nudging them on who to vote for.

    Why stop there? You could pay a person to sign or turn in a blank ballot… Or simply throw away ballots that don’t vote the right way. We are not saying that all of these methods of fraud are equally likely, you probably could prevent some of them with safeguards but the point is this. Universal mail-in voting with ballot harvesting massively expands the potential for voter fraud and it makes a mockery of the secret ballot.

    I don’t care what Twitter tells you, that’s true. It’s obvious. And by the way, it’s been documented. In the past decade, most battles over voter fraud have centered around whether to require an I.D. to vote like most every countries do. But that’s not the real issue… Ballot harvesting is the… choice for those that want to steal an election.

  • “New book claims Bill Clinton had an affair with Ghislaine Maxwell.” Live look at Alex Jones:

  • “Canceled Contact Tracing Contract Reveals Michigan Authorized Democrat Firm for 400 Activists to Collect Medical Information.” Governor MegaKaren has been generous spreading that sweet graft around… (Hat tip: Cut Jib News at Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “28 North Koreans Charged In Sweeping Conspiracy To Launder $2.5 Billion For Nuclear Program.”
  • ACLU folds on abortion lawsuit against Texas cities over “sanctuary cities for the unborn.” Which makes you wonder why. Is keeping a slender reed of hope for keeping sanctuary cities for the inevitable illegal alien amnesty more important than the sacrament of abortion? Or maybe, given that they’re all pretty small cities (Big Spring may be the largest) they just didn’t want to spend money on it?
  • Facebook creates unaccountable international board to censors content.
  • “Mark Zuckerberg Finishes Another Long Day Of Deciding What People Should Believe.”
  • They’re still upset that we’re allowed to call it the “Wuhan virus”:

  • Former Texas Representative (and Vietnam War POW) Sam Johnson dead at age 89.
  • California Democrats desperately want to be able to discriminate on race again. (Hat tip: Gail Heriot at Instapundit.)
  • “He Was Falsely Accused Of Rape By His Ex. He Just Won The Largest Defamation Case In Minnesota History.”
  • No baseball for you!
  • Dixie Chicken roof in College Station collapses. No one injured, snake recaptured.
  • “In praise of pointy things.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • That is pretty amazing:

  • Ed Driscoll looks back at The Lives of Others (a film everyone should watch).
  • Rescue K-9:

  • Important historical note: North Korean founder Kim Il Sung did not have the ability to teleport.
  • Time magazine names Karen as Person of the Year.

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »

    Paris Riots Redux

    Wednesday, December 19th, 2018

    A roundup on the ongoing French “yellow jackets” protests/riots/revolution:

  • At least eight people have died. That’s more than died in the short-lived Soviet coup attempt in 1991.
  • The role of immigration in the French riots:

    Even as the gilets jaunes were ruining the holiday season for the French capital’s richest consumers and most deluxe emporia, a whole different set of protesters tried to disrupt the metropolis’s high-culture scene. On Sunday evening, a mob of two to three hundred migrants, asylum seekers, and illegal aliens, mostly of African origin, stormed the Comédie Française, where a performance of Victor Hugo’s play Lucrezia Borgia was underway. Their goal was reportedly to compel, or convince, the deputy manager of the legendary theater to arrange an appointment for them with Minister of the Interior Christophe Castaner, and thereby help them to secure residency documents. An odd approach, to say the least, but maybe this sort of thing makes more sense in France, where high culture, after all, rules. In any event, the mob was successfully repelled, first by the theater guards, then by a large cohort of gendarmes who arrived on the scene with a celerity that one does not immediately associate with French cops. But of course the police in every country have their own priorities: while British bobbies, for example, are quicker to check out reports of online Islamophobia than of Muslim gang rape, it would only make sense for their Gallic counterparts to be more concerned about productions of Victor Hugo dramas in the first arrondisement than about honor killings outside the Périphérique.

    Snip.

    I began this article by suggesting that it’s getting hard to keep track of these demonstrations in France. In fact, when you come right down to it, the whole thing is really pretty simple. On one side you’ve got these mobs of immigrants, most of whom have no business being in France in the first place, but who, instead of keeping a low profile and showing some gratitude for what the French state has already given them, have a breathtaking sense of entitlement that makes them feel free to charge the very temples of French culture and issue arrogant demands. On the other side, you have humble French workers, most of them from the provinces, who have seen their wages stagnate, in large part because of the mass influx of competitive immigrant labor, and seen their taxes soar, in large part because of the government’s need to fund ballooning social-welfare benefits for immigrants who choose not to work.

    During the last couple of years, more and more commentators have suggested that America is splitting into two countries — one composed of immigrants and favored identity groups and their politically correct cultural-elite allies and the other of disgruntled red-state patriots who feel used, neglected, betrayed, and fed up — and that the country is inevitably headed for civil war. That may or may not be an exaggeration. But one thing is clear: a very similar split has long been taking shape — and is even more pronounced — in Western Europe, where the immigrant tide is higher and its impact on the daily lives of ordinary natives even more severe. It’s scarcely a surprise that mass demos motivated by these concerns are making their debut in France, where public protest is the national pastime, but no one should be surprised if large-scale revolts by both the invaders and the invaded begin to be weekly fare in other Western European countries, too. After all, the pressure is mounting all around, and eventually something’s got to give.

    (Hat tip: Stephen green at Instapundit.

  • Claire Berlinksi also saw two different groups: Orderly middle class protestors against the tax hike, and antifa-types who came to explicitly do violence:

    People at the Charles de Gaulle Étoile saw something else entirely. There, the police were physically overwhelmed by about 5,000 Gilets Jaunes who had come explicitly prepared to do violence. About 200 demonstrators showed their ID and allowed police to search them before they entered a security zone on the Champs-Elysées, but the rest refused to play by the rules. From about 8 am, hostile crowds of Gilets Jaunes emerged, in large numbers, from all the avenues around the Arc de Triomphe, trying to push their way onto the Champs-Elysées. The police were physically overpowered because so many of them were protecting the Champs-Elysées and the perimeter around the area where government buildings are concentrated. They were overrun. There were no cops behind the rioters to stop them from burning cars on the other avenues around the Étoile.

    The rioter demographics were surprising. They were mainly aged 30-40, the police reported—a bit old for rioting, you’d think. They were “socially well-inserted” into the movement, but unlike the majority of the protesters, they had come with the goal of breaking and smashing things, rejecting the authority of the state and its symbols as savagely as they could. Of the 378 people taken into custody on Saturday, only 33 were minors. Most were rural men. The security services had drastically underestimated the number of violent protesters who would arrive and where they would be. It was immediately clear that this represented a massive police intelligence failure. The Elysée called a crisis meeting. Reports leaked to the press that the failure to anticipate the size of the violent and radicalized contingent of Gilet Jaunes was of a magnitude that “could lead to a deep reform of the Paris police headquarters,” as one television channel put it.

    But it isn’t hard to understand how this mistake was made. Most people’s contact with the movement, including the police’s, was like mine—again, most seem to be peaceful, sympathetic people, respectful of authority, and simply too old for that kind of mayhem. What kind of 40-year-old guy from a rural farm comes to Paris carrying a gas mask and a makeshift weapon to desecrate the Arc de Triomphe? I sure wouldn’t have guessed there were so many of them, either.

  • Emmanuel Macron’s run as a technocratic reformer may be coming to an end:

    Macron, who suddenly became head of state at the age of 39, first needed to develop his authority. And he did so with a clear strategy, setting out doing so with single-minded determination, seeking to develop charisma through images and symbols, and to carry out his revolution through shrewd argumentation. He put himself at the epicenter of French politics. As a candidate, he was alone. And he remained so as president. But this over-personalization had its price. Macron’s system relied on the complete centralization of power in the hands of the president and of a few intellectually gifted advisors, who sometimes send out text messages at 3 a.m., as Macron does himself. Macron’s IQ-absolutism was successful in his first year. The furthest-reaching job-market reforms in recent French history, which he instituted in fall of 2017, didn’t even lead to a general strike, as had been feared. Macron loosened the rules for firing employees and broke up the rigid wage-negotiation system. He simultaneously lowered the budget deficit below the 3-percent mark for the first time since 2007. He even modernized the sacrosanct French secondary-school diploma, known as the baccalauréat. Emmanuel Macron has already reformed his country more profoundly than all the presidents before him — at least since Mitterrand, who implemented an important wave of modernization starting in 1983.

    Macron is proud of his reforms. Rightly so. He believes these reforms will bring growth back to France. Rightly so. He also believes that new growth in France will repair the social imbalances in the country. Rightly so. But Macron is forgetting about the span of time required between reform, growth and social justice. Many French don’t want to wait. They want results. Immediately. The yellow vests don’t have a face, but they have charisma. And they are united in anger. They want a revolution and they want more net income. They don’t care what this might mean economically for their highly indebted country. They loathe the self-proclaimed revolutionary at the top, his aloof reliance on symbols, his know-it-all revolutionary rationality. Although the Élysée’s arguments are technocratically coherent, the gilets jaunes confront them with brutal simplicity: If you abolish the wealth tax but raise the price of diesel by six cents per liter, you are an enemy of the people.

  • About 40 highway toll booths have been occupied and burned. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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    Posted in Border Control, Foreign Policy | No Comments »

    Paris Burning and the Existential Crisis

    Saturday, December 8th, 2018

    So French President Emmanuel Macron was forced to delay implementation of his carbon tax hike because the peasants were revolting French citizens were blocking traffic, burning vehicles, and battling police throughout the streets of Paris.

    Nearly 300,000 protesters, many wearing yellow vests, took to the streets, including tens of thousands in Paris. Participation in the “yellow vest” protests, named after the yellow vests French drivers are required to keep in their vehicles for emergencies, fell to approximately 166,000 with 8,000 in Paris in the second weekend, but by the third weekend the protest gained momentum and violence.

    The protests were sparked by Macron’s plans to increase taxes on gasoline, diesel, and electricity, and to enforce stricter limits on emissions from vehicles, in an effort to force people out of their cars and suburban homes, and onto public transit and back into densely populated cities. In Paris, protesters sang the national anthem and carried signs saying “Macron, resignation” and “Macron, thief,” and stormed barricades erected by the 3,000 to 5,000 security forces deployed to guard the presidential palace and National Assembly. Outside of Paris, protestors blocked highways, overran motorway toll booths, and obstructed access to gasoline stations and shopping malls.

    On average, French gasoline costs a whopping $7.00 per gallon, and diesel more than $6.00 per gallon, with a majority of the price coming from fuel taxes imposed by the national government. These taxes had been scheduled to increase annually in the coming years, to meet Macron’s carbon dioxide emission reduction goals.

    “We’re going to tax you until you bleed until you adopt a lifestyle more in tune with the way we think you should live.” For global leftists elites, global warming is not just a holy cause, but an existential struggle whose high stakes (“We’re all going to die!”) require ignoring any democratic pushback from the less-enlightened masses. And we’re just supposed to ignore the fact they write themselves cushy green energy tax breaks while imposing the overwhelming majority of the costs for such policies on ordinary people who live differently than they do. (While Paris burns, Macron is conspicuous by his absence.)

    But it’s important to remember that conservatives have an existential threat of their own (deficit spending triggering hyperinflation that will destroy the economy), the solution to which (cutting back on the welfare state) is also deeply unpopular with wide swathes of the populace.

    The difference, of course, is that the doomsday scenario of anthropocentric global warming is entirely conjectural, while hyperinflation has happened several times throughout history.

    This is why you’re seeing the signs of that weird left-right populist nationalist fusion across Europe: No taxes increase, but also no welfare state cuts, while also restricting immigration so only natives get the cushy welfare handouts. That seems like an obvious recipe for electoral success in countries where even the EU’s weak tea “austerity” is increasingly unthinkable. But it’s not a recipe for growth, and can’t stave off the inevitable doom of a demographically unsustainable welfare state. In America it takes the form of President Donald Trump, a dogged tax-cutter and deregulator working diligently to get the economy growing again, but not someone who has tried to pare back the deficit or the welfare state in any meaningful way.

    Europe’s sclerotic economy and demographic decline are going to bring on a crisis there long before it hits here, but it will eventually hit here. In the long run, the big government welfare state is likely to be seen as one of the longer-running mass delusions in history.

    There will come a reckoning. The only question is whether you and I will be there to see it…

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    Posted in Budget, Economics, Global Warming, video, Welfare State | No Comments »

    If The Left Can’t Win a Street Fight in Berkeley, Where Can They Win?

    Tuesday, April 18th, 2017

    This weekend someone asked me “What happened in Berkeley?” And I had to answer “Dunno, I was busy finishing my taxes, eating ridiculously large quantities of meat, and watching the resurrected Mystery Science Theater 3000.”

    But the answer seems to be a street fight between left and right where the left got it’s ass kicked.

    Various right-wing factions held a free speech rally, “antifa” showed up with the explicit intent (as per their posters) of committing violence and instead ended up on the losing end of the beatdown.

    Just a few months ago, leftists were extolling the virtues of “punching Nazis.” Now they’re funding out what happens when ordinary Americans who don’t take kindly to being called Nazis punch back.

    Some video from the event:

    David French in National Review:

    If the media accurately and comprehensively reported on leftist mob violence, it would see that a pattern has emerged: On campus and in the streets, a violent or menacing core seizes the ground it wants, blocks access to buildings, and shuts down the speech or events it seeks to suppress. This violent core is often surrounded and protected by a larger group of ostensibly “peaceful” protesters who sometimes cheer aggression wildly and then provide cover for the rioters, who melt back into the crowd. After the riot, the polite progressives condemn the violence, urge that it not distract from the alleged rightness of the underlying cause, and then do virtually nothing to enforce the law and punish the offenders.

    Snip.

    Saturday, we saw more clashes in what now threatens to become an increasingly vicious, violent war for control of America’s streets. Leftist “antifa” or “black bloc” rioters met pro-Trump “Oath Keepers,” bikers, and alt-right goons in a barely contained battle royale, with assaults and beatings streamed live and posted to YouTube. Police struggled to control the violence and often appeared completely absent as brawls broke out across entire city blocks. By the end of the fighting, Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer said, “Militias, alt-right, nazis etc. won today in Berkeley. They outnumbered the opposition, pushed it back, and held downtown.”

    I would note that there’s a limit to how violent things can be get half the melee participants are busy videotaping the proceedings.

    The Berkeley police certainly weren’t controlling the situation:

    These riots and battles are 100% instigated by the same leftwing black bloc radicals that seem at the heart of every violent confrontation. They’ve previously given the illusion of numbers by traveling long distances to commit their mayhem, but are actually a tiny minority. But if they can’t win a pitched street battle in the hard left enclave of Berkeley, where can they win one?

    If these battles continue to escalate, Democrats will soon regret picking a fight with the half of the country that actually owns guns…

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for February 3, 2017

    Friday, February 3rd, 2017

    It’s been a weird, busy week here at BattleSwarm World Headquarters, including a bunch of job interviews and having my iMac in the shop most of the week. Now I’m back up and running, and even have that OS upgrade (to El Capitan) I’ve been putting off for longer than you would believe (I was running Mac OS 10.6.8).

    All of which explains why today’s LinkSwarm is somewhat abbreviated.

  • Democrats retreat from reality:

    “Real people” are what the Democratic Party is sorely missing. By real I do not mean the members of a specific ethnic or religious or cultural or regional group but simply those men and women who are uninterested in the latest trend embraced by the left. For the Democratic Party to win again, it would need to recapture voters in the Midwest and Appalachia who supported Barack Obama twice but felt so disillusioned and dejected by the end of his second term, so utterly unenthused by the bland and corrupt technological illiterate the party nominated to replace him, that they embraced an outsider who promised to upend the system. The Trump era is just beginning, but so far Democrats have been much more willing to retreat into their ideological cubbyholes, or ascribe the election results to (take your pick) James Comey, fake news, or Russian subversion, than to acknowledge the power of nationalism and populism. It’s their loss.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Democrats still don’t get it:

    3) The race/class/gender agenda so favored by coastal elites and promulgated by media, Hollywood, and popular culture is an anathema to Middle America, especially its strange disconnect between affluence and the mandate for purportedly progressive equality. Moralistic lectures from wealthy people are not a way to win over the working classes. Rants by Hollywood celebrities and racialist sermons by would-be DNC chairs will not win over 51 percent of the voters in swing states. The twin agents of progressive dogma, the media and the university, are themselves under financial duress, must recalibrate, and have lost support from half the country.

  • Over at Ace of Spades Open Blogger helps articulate what I call the “How my liberal Facebook friends helped elect Trump” theory:

    Let me start by saying that Donald Trump is a reactionary phenomenon and most of us who voted for him are, by definition, reactionaries. And I would argue that most of this is due to social media.

    When one looks at the left wing, you can basically separate the institutional left from what I call the soft left. The institutional left consists of the political players and their lackeys, media, academics, street agitators and the like. These are the people that shape the direction, agenda, strategy and tactics of the left.

    The soft left are the voters. They don’t give much thought to anything other than their preferences, which the Democrat party caters to very effectively. They are, traditionally, passive players.

    Now I’ve understood since the Clinton years that the institutional left was actively seeking to harm me. Historically they’ve primarily done this through policy while other tactics such as demonization, othering, character assassination and lawfare were generally reserved for powerful political players and institutions on the right.

    During the Obama years, we saw a radical shift. No longer were the Tom Delays and the Rush Limbaughs of the world the exclusive targets of what Bill Clinton labeled “the politics of personal destruction.” Your average citizen was now in the cross hairs as well.

    I first became aware of this during the Joe the Plumber episode when the media relentlessly attacked a citizen simply for asking, on his own property where Barack Obama was a guest, a question that happened to make their Boy-King look silly.

    I thought it was a one-off due to the threat that Plumber’s inquiry posed, but soon after the examples piled up–the slandering of the Tea Party movement, targeting of Christian wedding photographers, the harassment of the Memories Pizza owners, etc…

    Which leads me to social media, Facebook specifically.

    As this dramatic shift occurred, we began to see another shift within social media, one that reached its apex during the 2016 presidential election. That was the politicization of everything, not just by the institutional left, but by the soft left as well.

    Where before the voters on the left were mostly passive receivers of Cultural Marxism, they had now become active participants via propaganda, slander, social shaming, and otherizing. This meant that conservatives were now being assaulted on two fronts, both from the institutional left and the soft left.

    Every conservative who is active on Facebook knows what I’m talking about. After decades of Americans keeping their politics mostly to themselves, suddenly our feeds were jammed up with political invective.

    It wasn’t just directed at politicians. It was personal–a relentless litany of insults and abuse, first at the Tea Party and then Trump supporters. Most of it was generalized, but the message was clear. They held our kind in contempt and didn’t care who knew it. In fact, they seemed to be in a contest to see who could broadcast it the loudest.

    Most conservatives were hurt by this. We tend to keep our politics relatively private, both out of decorum and respect for our relationships with people whose politics differ from ours. The message that these public posts sent to us was that our “friends” on the left didn’t respect or value us enough to avoid giving offense.

    As someone who has been following politics since high school, I tend not to trust my own instincts what the average voter thinks. I’m simply to close to the subject. My wife, however, is a fairly low-key traditionalist who doesn’t care to immerse herself in that world and so I use her as my political weather vane.

    And so I knew that there was a storm brewing when she snapped down her phone over breakfast one day after reading Facebook and told me how sick and tired she was of her friends’ political posts.

    “When they say those things,” she fumed, “they’re talking about our family.”

    “I’m so sick and tired of being told that I’m a bad person because I disagree with someone’s position on abortion or transgender bathrooms. Who do they think they are to tell everyone what they’re required to believe?”

    The hurt had turned to anger and quiet resolve.

    The left sought to reprimand the right. What they did was alienate it. Their social media echo chamber only served to steel conservative misgivings about Donald Trump, if for no other reason than we simply couldn’t abide by being pushed around for another 4-8 years.

    It’s one thing to know that your friends disagree with you. It’s another to realize that they think you’re stupid, uneducated, a bigot, bully, sexist, jerk and everything that’s wrong with the world.

    It’s then that you realize that it’s not just the institutional left that yearns to place its boot on your neck, it’s your left-wing neighbors, friends, coworkers and even family. When you see attacks on regular citizens cheered and reinforced by people on Facebook, your worldview changes radically.

    You can no longer believe that they don’t really understand what they’re voting for. It becomes clear that they do–they’re voting to turn you into a second class citizen, an “other” who is not due the same rights and courtesies as their exhalted tribe of Right Thinkers.

    We loathed Obama and all the Marxist cockroaches surrounding him. Now we were beginning to loathe his supporters.

    Donald Trump had exposed the press for the lying, shameless partisan hacks that they are. But social media exposed the soft left, the formerly passive Democrat party support.

    This is why the left never saw it coming. They took over public spaces and shouted down the opposition with personal attacks. Horrified conservatives withdrew from engagement, but we didn’t disappear.

    We seethed with resentment and contempt.

    And it drove us to the polls, quietly and without fanfare, like assassins in the night.

    The left still doesn’t know what hit him. They’re still too busy screeching, insulting, protesting, rioting, and trying to manipulate the rules to ask the simple question: Why?

    I’ll tell you why. We see you. We see what you’ve become. And we’re not having what you’ve been dishing out any longer.

  • The rise of the alt-left intifada. “Just like ISIS and Hamas have found the use of unique hashtags on social media to recruit and radicalize, unique hashtags are now being used by groups here in the U.S. that call for violence, protest, resistance and anarchy. By the use of these unique hashtags with a call to action to a specified group and location, the online mob becomes a real world-mob that can cause damage, disruption and violence, like we just witnessed in Berkeley.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Why Democrats have declared war on Trump: They’re terrified:

    I believe it stems from the inability of many Democrats to accept their defeat in November, or to understand that the people of mainland America — that heartland between California and New York — overwhelmingly rejected their elitist vision and collectivist values.

    During the campaign, Donald Trump made a number of specific promises to the American people. Over the past 10 days, he has been fulfilling them one by one and the Democrats are tearing out their hair, because they know what this means for 2018.

    Democrats are terrified that Trump will succeed.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • The war between President Trump and the bureaucracy. “Not only are there two Americas. There are two governments: one elected and one not, one that alternates between Republicans and Democrats and one that remains, decade after decade, stubbornly liberal, contemptuous of Congress, and resistant to change. It is this second government and its allies in the media and the Democratic Party that are after President Trump, that want him driven from office before his term is complete.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • DHS Secretary John Kelly says that the border wall should be finished in two years. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • The Other McCain has more on the Berkeley riot.
  • Milo (congrats liberals, your hate has tuned him into a one-named celebrity like Bono or Cher) talks about being the object of SJW wrath in the center of it:

  • Mother killed by President Trump’s travel ban is a hoax. She died five days before he even issued the order.
  • Army selects Sig Saur as it’s new official pistol.
  • Texas Governor Greg Abbott cuts funding to Travis County over the sheriff’s refusal to enforce immigration laws.
  • “Women send Gov. Abbott soiled tampons.” Because that’s a dandy way to prove to moderates that feminists aren’t deranged lunatics.
  • “I Don’t Dress For Men, I Dress For The Sea Witch That Cursed Me.” Parody site, just in case that was unclear.

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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Guns, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »

    SJWs Riot in Berkely To Keep Milo From Speaking

    Thursday, February 2nd, 2017

    The tolerant left proves itself again, rioting in order to prevent gay conservative Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking.

    MILO’s event at UC Berkely was cancelled and the venue evacuated over an hour before it was scheduled to begin, after masked left-wing protesters stormed the venue, overturning police barricades and lighting fires.

    The event devolved rapidly after the arrival of a large number of black-masked protesters, who immediately stormed the venue’s barricades, threw fireworks towards police officers, and lit fires.

    Multiple fires have been recorded on video, and police are attempting to subdue the crowd with rubber bullets. Police have advised members of the public to stay away from the area surrounding the venue.

    Snip.

    According to the reporter, police issued a dispersal order to the crowd, declaring it an unlawful assembly, but they have not yet attempted to move the protesters out of the plaza.

    In a comment, MILO said “At Berkeley, once the home of the free speech movement, leftists tried to set a building on fire to stop me speaking. Leftist violence is now completely out of control. Soon it’ll be the conservatives that’ll need safe spaces … with armed guards and fire extinguishers!”

    Every time a Yiannopoulos event gets cancelled due to leftwing violence, his point that the left is a far greater threat to free speech than the right is only proved further.

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    Posted in Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | 1 Comment »

    Leftwing Inauguration Lunacy

    Monday, January 23rd, 2017

    The problem with compiling one of these “liberals freak out over Trump” posts is: Where do you stop? Every day since November 8 has brought new examples of liberal anger, violence, smug condescension, projection, virtue signaling, etc. Pretty much everything except but (with a few notable exceptions here and there) serious attempts to grapples with why America has rejected the Democratic Party.

    So this segment only covers the lunacy on display this weekend surrounding the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States of America.

  • A majority of the 230 protesters arrested on Inauguration Day will face up to 10 years in prison and up to a $25,000 fine and will be faced with federal charges of felony rioting. Things have changed, snowflakes… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Among those arrested: Scott Ryan Charney, AKA Scott Green, caught on screen in a Project Veritas sting:

    DisruptJ20 protesters dismissed as a joke an undercover Project Veritas video showing activists supposedly planning to shut down Thursday night’s DeploraBall by setting off smoke bombs or the sprinkler system — but D.C. police weren’t buying it.

    The 34-year-old man arrested Thursday night for conspiracy to commit assault at the event was among the activists featured in the undercover video released this week, according to court documents made public on Friday.

    Scott Ryan Charney was one of the three men caught on camera discussing plans to set off fire alarms and spray Butyric acid — an ingredient commonly used in stink bombs — at the National Press Club, where the party for Donald Trump supporters was held Thursday night. In the Project Veritas video, Mr. Charney is identified as Scott Green, the documents state.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “After protestors got tired of chanting “love trumps hate,” they started chucking rocks at cops.”
  • At least some pf the protests were a trained show for the cameras:

    The protesters waited until the cameras were set up to begin “agitating.”

    They organized around the camera positions between D and 7th and K and 12th, and performed for the news crews. We walked through those areas and there was no violence as the cameras were just getting set up after the inauguration events.

    These were not just angry people. They were trained, likely paid, agitators. They were coordinated with with press so the crews knew exactly where to put there cameras. The filming angles, shots and probably even the actions of the agitators were staged. And the news ran with their footage over and over again.

    The progression from “peaceful” protest, to confronting the police, to vandalism was set for maximum impact so people would focus on this and not the historic events taking place just blocks away.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Want to find a leftwing protest? Look for the burning American flag.
  • “Ugly women holding up ugly signs expressing ugly sentiments — the #WomensMarch to protest Donald Trump’s presidency is perhaps the clearest explanation of why Donald Trump is president. The all-out feminist crusade mounted on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign reminded millions of Americans of why they hate feminism. Yet it is clear today that Democrats have learned nothing from their defeat.”
  • “Soros Has Links to 56 ‘Partners’ of the Women’s March on Washington.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • This one has to be seen to be believed: Man sitting down on plane gets asked whether he’s going to D.C. to protest. He says he’s going to celebrate democracy. His smug, entitled, condescending Trump Derangement-suffering liberal seatmate precedes to make such a scene harassing and attacking him for his beliefs that security actually escorts her off the plane, to the applause of fellow passengers. With video. Really, you have to see this to believe it.
  • Some tweets:

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    Posted in Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | 1 Comment »

    Waco Biker Shootout Follow-Up 6

    Wednesday, May 27th, 2015

    We’re finally starting to get a fuller picture of how the Waco biker shootout between the Bandidos and the Cossacks actually went down. A Cossack who was there says that they were set up by Bandidos who invited them to Twin Peaks.

    He said that the Cossacks were invited to the Twin Peaks patio that day — by a Bandido leader, who offered to make peace in a long-running feud between the two gangs. That invitation was a setup for an ambush, though, according to the Cossack. That’s why the dead included six Cossacks, one Scimitar (an ally of the Cossacks) and only two Bandidos.

    Snip.

    “It was a setup from start to finish,” he said.

    The Cossack’s story has been impossible to verify, but it is largely consistent with what police have said about how the brawl began.

    Related stories:

  • “While the black Baltimore rioters and looters were called thugs, no white Waco rioters and looters were thus characterized. I wonder, why might that be? Oh, yeah, that’s right: there are no white rioters and looters in Waco.”
  • Here’s some maybe-not-entirely-wrong pop-psychological analysis of the shootout as almost entirely a generational issue: the Bandidos are old and the Cossacks are young.
  • Cossacks cancel a rally in the town of Mingus over safety concerns.
  • Information on the Indian American LLC that owns the Waco Twin Peaks.
  • The owner of an adjacent restaurant is suing Twin Peaks for damages. (Hat tip: Dwight.)

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    Posted in Crime, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »

    UK Rioters: Nothing Says Classy Like Defacing a WWII Monument

    Sunday, May 10th, 2015

    Evidently the UK hard left is having a giant hissy fit in London over the fact they got their asses kicked by the Tories in this week’s election.

    Also, here’s a helpful hint: When you start throwing things at police, you’re no longer part of a “protest,” you’re part of a “riot.”

    And what says “Class” like defacing a World War II Monument?

    “Hey greatest generation: Screw all of you! Defeating Hitler means nothing unless we can keep increasing the size of the welfare state!”

    All the left’s temper tantrum will accomplish is reminding voters why they gave the Tories a clear majority in the first place.

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    Baltimore is the Natural Fruit of the Democratic Welfare State

    Wednesday, April 29th, 2015

    Despite the best effort of the far-left to spin it as such, the riots in Baltimore were not an “uprising” against “oppression.” (What oppression, the tyranny of CVS stores selling goods people want and the racism of fire hoses?) Instead, they were the standard, predictable outcome of the American welfare state.

    Liberals pounced on Rand Paul citing a lack of fathers for the Baltimore riots, but he is essentially correct. Walter Williams addresses the theme:

    In 1950, female-headed households were 18 percent of the black population. Today it’s close to 70 percent. One study of 19th-century slave families found that in up to three-fourths of the families, all the children lived with the biological mother and father. In 1925 New York City, 85 percent of black households were two-parent households. Herbert Gutman, author of “The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925,” reports, “Five in six children under the age of six lived with both parents.” Also, both during slavery and as late as 1920, a teenage girl raising a child without a man present was rare among blacks.

    A study of 1880 family structure in Philadelphia found that three-quarters of black families were nuclear families (composed of two parents and children). What is significant, given today’s arguments that slavery and discrimination decimated the black family structure, is the fact that years ago, there were only slight differences in family structure among racial groups.

    Coupled with the dramatic breakdown in the black family structure has been an astonishing growth in the rate of illegitimacy. The black illegitimacy rate in 1940 was about 14 percent; black illegitimacy today is over 70 percent, and in some cities, it is over 80 percent.

    The point of bringing up these historical facts is to ask this question, with a bit of sarcasm: Is the reason the black family was far healthier in the late 1800s and 1900s that back then there was far less racial discrimination and there were greater opportunities? Or did what experts call the “legacy of slavery” wait several generations to victimize today’s blacks?

    Charles Murray made an exceptionally strong and well-researched case in Losing Ground that this rise in illegitimacy is a direct result of the perverse incentives of the American welfare system, in that single women garner far more welfare benefits than married women. (Another factor blighting inner city prospects is the loss of entry levels jobs for those who never attended college, some from globalization, but even more from an unchecked flow of illegal aliens taking those same jobs for lower wages and no government-mandated job benefits, thus knocking them off the first rung of the economic opportunity ladder.)

    That welfare dependency was a big reason welfare was reformed in the 1990s to require more wlefare recipients to work. Naturally the Obama Administration gutted those reforms.

    As John Nolte puts it, Baltimore is the direct result of Democratic Party policies:

    Contrary to the emotional blackmail some leftists are attempting to peddle, Baltimore is not America’s problem or shame. That failed city is solely and completely a Democrat problem. Like many failed cities, Detroit comes to mind, and every city besieged recently by rioting, Democrats and their union pals have had carte blanche to inflict their ideas and policies on Baltimore since 1967, the last time there was a Republican Mayor.

    In 2012, after four years of his own failed policies, President Obama won a whopping 87.4% of the Baltimore City vote. Democrats run the city of Baltimore, the unions, the schools, and, yes, the police force. Since 1969, there have only been only been two Republican governors of the State of Maryland.

    Elijah Cummings has represented Baltimore in the U.S. Congress for more than thirty years. As I write this, despite his objectively disastrous reign, the Democrat-infested mainstream media is treating the Democrat like a local folk hero, not the obvious and glaring failure he really is.

    Every single member of the Baltimore city council is a Democrat.

    Liberalism and all the toxic government dependence and cronyism and union corruption and failed schools that comes along with it, has run amok in Baltimore for a half-century, and that is Baltimore’s problem. It is the free people of Baltimore who elect and then re-elect those who institute policies that have so spectacularly failed that once-great city.

    Kevin D. Williamson expands upon the theme:

    American cities are by and large Democratic-party monopolies, monopolies generally dominated by the so-called progressive wing of the party. The results have been catastrophic, and not only in poor black cities such as Baltimore and Detroit. Money can paper over some of the defects of progressivism in rich, white cities such as Portland and San Francisco, but those are pretty awful places to be non-white and non-rich, too: Blacks make up barely 9 percent of the population in San Francisco, but they represent 40 percent of those arrested for murder, and they are arrested for drug offenses at ten times their share of the population. Criminals make their own choices, sure, but you want to take a look at the racial disparity in educational outcomes and tell me that those low-income nine-year-olds in Wisconsin just need to buck up and bootstrap it?

    Black urban communities face institutional failure across the board every day….

    Baltimore’s police department is, like Detroit’s economy and Atlanta’s schools, the product of the progressive wing of the Democratic party enabled in no small part by black identity politics. This is entirely a left-wing project, and a Democratic-party project…

    The evidence suggests very strongly that the left-wing, Democratic claques that run a great many American cities — particularly the poor and black cities — are not capable of running a school system or a police department. They are incompetent, they are corrupt, and they are breathtakingly arrogant. Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore — this is what Democrats do.

    And, as Allen West notes, it is more specifically a black democratic problem:

    The population of Baltimore is 622,000 and 63 percent of its population is black. The mayor, state’s attorney, police chief and city council president are black, as is 48 percent of the police force. But as 36-year-old Robert Stokes says, “You look around and see unemployment. Filling out job applications and being turned down because of where you live and your demographic. It’s so much bigger than the police department.”

    Everyone wants to have an honest conversation about race, so let’s us endeavor to do just that. Now, of course, when you speak the hard truth about race issues in America – and not just the liberal progressive talking points – and you’re white, you’ll be branded a racist. And if you’re black, well, y’all just watch the comments below and see the denigrating drivel.

    Snip.

    Every single major urban center in America is run by Democrats — more specifically, liberal progressives, black or white. The morass that became Detroit. The killing fields of Chicago. The depravity of Washington DC. The shame of South Dallas. And yes, even the place that was once my home, Atlanta — even with all the successful black entertainers…

    Just do the assessment yourselves, who are the elected officials heading up the urban centers? And where does one find the most dire socio-economic statistics?

    Yet we hear these rioters blame whites — well, they need to make sure they’re specifically blaming the correct whites — those on the left. Blacks have been herded into these inner city clusters, a new economic plantation and in this 50th year of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society — well, the unintended, or maybe intended, consequences are deplorable.

    There was a time when America’s disasterous welfare policies could be chalked up to good intentions gone awry. That time has long since passed. It seems that both a large, welfare-dependent underclass, and a small cadre of thugs willing to riot over racial grievance-mongering at the drop of a hat, benefit the Democratic Party.

    At what point do we conclude that the destructive welfare policies the Democratic Party promotes and maintains exist not despite their exceptionally harmful effects on poor black Americans, but because of them?

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Welfare State | No Comments »

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