Posts Tagged ‘Social Justice Warriors’

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Westboro Baptist Church For Thee, But Not For Me

Sunday, January 27th, 2019

Remember the Westboro Baptist Church? They were a tiny band of idiots who traveled the country protesting gay rights at military funerals for some damn reason. The mainstream media reported constantly on their stupid antics as a means to smear, by implication, any Republican opposition to any liberal culture war issue. The national media is always looking for such a group to puff up in importance as a designated hate object to smear Republicans and promote cohesion among the Democratic Paarty’s fractious factions.

That’s what the national media tried to do with the Covington Catholic kids: Conjure up a hate group of Otherness representing strains of thought (Catholic orthodoxy, Trump supporters) that threaten the goals of the Democratic Party, no matter that they were teenagers. ironically, there was a group at the Lincoln Monument that day whose beliefs and actions recall the Westboro Baptist Church, but it wasn’t the Covington kids.

Andrew Sullivan, who watched all the videos of the incident so you don’t have to, has the scoop:

What I saw was extraordinary bigotry, threats of violence, hideous misogyny, disgusting racism, foul homophobia, and anti-Catholicism — not by the demonized schoolboys, but by grown men with a bullhorn, a small group of self-styled Black Hebrew Israelites. They’re a fringe sect — but an extremely aggressive one — known for inflammatory bigotry in public. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated them a hate group: “strongly anti-white and anti-Semitic.” They scream abuse at gays, women, white people, Jews, interracial couples, in the crudest of language. In their public display of bigotry, they’re at the same level as the Westboro Baptist sect: shockingly obscene. They were the instigators of the entire affair.

And yet the elite media seemed eager to downplay their role, referring to them only in passing, noting briefly that they were known to be anti-Semitic and anti-gay. After several days, the New York Times ran a news analysis on the group by John Eligon that reads like a press release from the sect: “They shout, use blunt and sometimes offensive language, and gamely engage in arguments aimed at drawing listeners near.” He notes that “they group people based on what they call nations, believing that there are 12 tribes among God’s chosen people. White people are not among those tribes, they believe, and will therefore be servants when Christ returns to Earth.” Nothing to see here, folks. Just a bunch of people preaching the enslavement of another race in public on speakers in the most inflammatory language imaginable.

Eligon actually writes: “Whatever tensions are sparked by Hebrew Israelite teaching, some adherents chalk that up to people being unwilling to accept uncomfortable doctrine.” The Washington Post ran a Style section headline about “the calculated art of making people uncomfortable.” In a news story entirely about the Black Israelites, the Washington Post did not quote a single thing they had said on the tape, gave a respectful account of their theology, and only mentioned their status as a “hate group” in the 24th paragraph, and put the term in scare quotes. Vox managed to write an explainer that also did not include a single example of any of the actual insults hurled at the Covington kids. Countless near-treatises were written parsing the layers of bigotry inside a silent schoolboy’s smirk.

Here’s what I saw on the full tape: a small group of aggressive, hateful men using a bullhorn to broadcast the crudest of racial slurs, backed up by recitations of Bible verses. I saw a young Native American woman make the mistake of engaging them. When she stood her ground, she was suddenly interrupted: “You’re out of order. Where’s your husband? Where’s your husband? Let me speak to him.” On the tape, you can hear the commentary from another member of the Black Israelites: “You see this? This is the problem, Israel. It’s always our women coming up with their loud mouth, thinking they can run and bogart things, thinking they can come and distract things with their loud-ass mouth, because they’re not used to dealing with real men. You think we’re supposed to bow down to your damn emotions when you come around here and run your mouth and distract what we’re doing instead of coming here with order … She’s coming around here being wicked.”

Wait, there’s more. Hollering through a bullhorn at a group of Native Americans, the speaker boomed: “You ain’t no child of God. You are the Indian. You are a blue-eyed demon. That’s the last Mohican.” Then: “You’re still worshipping totem poles. You out of your mind! You have to repent. You worship the buffalo. You worship the eagle. You worship the phoenix. These are the idols you’ve been worshipping. A damn buffalo ain’t gonna save you. You worship the creations and not the creator … That’s why you’re drunkards in the casinos and the damn plantation.” Another: “Dumb-ass niggers. Bunch of demons. You’re a bunch of Uncle Tomahawks.” They snarled the word “savages” at Native Americans. The yelling was deafening, aggressive, vile, and threatening. But an inscrutable smile by a white teen was enough for some elite liberals to urge punching a schoolboy in the face.

Here is how the Black Israelites verbally assaulted the schoolboys: “Bring your cracker ass up here. Dirty ass crackers, your day coming. We can give a hell about your police. No one’s playing with these dusty-ass crackers.” Another: “Don’t get too close or your ass gonna get punished … You crackers are some slithery ass bastards. You better keep your distance.” And this, surveying the scene: “I see you, a bunch of incest babies … Babies made out of incest. If you’re the great damn nation, get rid of the lice on your back. … You’re a bunch of hyenas. You outnumber us but you keep your distance. You couldn’t touch us if you wanted to. You worship blasphemy.”

So not only are these “Black Hebrew Israelites” as poisonous as the Westboro Baptist Church, they’re demonstrably more so, adding racism, sexism and anti-American Indian animus ala mode on top of Westboro’s anti-gay pie. Yet where’s the endless coverage of Black Hebrew Israelite nastiness that the Westboro Baptist Church received for their professional irritant demonstrations? Nowhere. And we all know the reason why: As black people, their Democratic coalition and Victimhood Identity Politics standing puts them beyond criticism. They won’t be demonized for their lunatic beliefs because that demonization isn’t helpful in smearing the Republican Party, Catholics or Trump supporters. It’s the same reason Louis Farrakhan and Nation of Islam don’t get regular coverage of their lunatic beliefs. As Sullivan says in that essay: “This is the orthodoxy of elite media, and it is increasingly the job of journalists to fit the facts to the narrative and to avoid any facts that undermine it….Our mainstream press has been poisoned by tribalism.”

Though numbers are hard to come by, Black Hebrew Israelites probably outnumber the Westboro Baptist Church, who seemed to have a maximum membership of 40 people, by some 2-4 orders of magnitude. According to Wikiedia, the source of all vaguely accurate knowledge, there are multiple locations of multiple churches: Commandment Keepers, African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, Church of the Living God, Church of God and Saints of Christ (with supposedly 50 tabernacles), Orthodox Church of God and Saints of Christ, Church of God in Jesus Christ, Nation of Yahweh (which supposedly has “supporters in over 1,300 cities within the U.S. and 16 foreign countries,”) etc., though it’s unclear how accurate these numbers are, or how many adhere to the most poisonous black supremacist biblical interpretation.

For a taste of their beliefs, you can check out Nation of Yahweh’s website, which looks like it was built by the leader’s cousin after a semester of website design from a community college in the Geocities era, complete with Flash plugins and long PDFs on theology that cite the dictionary. Here’s just a little taste:

What does it mean to have an indifference to matters that are spiritual? Indifferent coming from the definition of worldly, the adjective form of indifference in the Webster’s New World College Dictionary, copyright 2004, on page 727 is tantamount to, “having or showing no interest, concern, or feeling.” Matter in the Synonym Finder by J.I Rodale, copyright 1978, on page 714, is synonymous to subject and topic; while on page 1145, spiritual is the same as godly, righteous, moral, and good.

I know I want to get my theology from freshman Comp 301 essays filled with obvious padding to make the word count.

But don’t expect any exposes of crazy Black Hebrew Israelite belief from the MSM anytime soon. That woudn’t be useful. It wouldn’t help advance the narrative…

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Posted in Democrats, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors | 1 Comment »

LinkSwarm for January 25, 2019

Friday, January 25th, 2019

How much of the vicious, fact-free attacks on the Covington kids were just baseline floating animus against Christians and Trump supporters on the part of the media, and how much are battlespace preparation over a possible nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsberg?

  • True tales from border enforcement. “I also had multiple cases where convicted child molesters were arrested illegally reentering the United States.” (Hat tip: Director Blue. )
  • Over at American Thinker, E.M. Cadwaladr is not a fan of recent immigration policy:

    The northeastern part of Columbus, Ohio used to be an unpretentious, unremarkable part of America. You could go there if you wanted to. It is now an unofficial colony of Somalia. The business signs, grimy and grey for decades, are now in Arabic. Somali women, grown fat on an American diet doled out by the public’s confiscated largesse, waddle along the street in their abysmal burkas. Somali men are something other than Americans with funny accents. Something has gone badly wrong.

    While I can still drive through this part of Columbus, I notice the Americans who used to live there, white and black, are fewer and farther between. I notice when I hear on the local news that a “refugee” has run his car into a group of students at Ohio State, then chased others down the street with a knife while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” I notice when another “migrant,” a Muslim from Ghana, enters a restaurant owned by an Israeli and proceeds to hack at the customers with a machete. America’s earlier minorities didn’t do these things. This is something new. I may be in Ohio, my dear Toto, but something tells me I’m not in my own country anymore. I’m in the middle of a pre-industrial, semi-literate, dystopian Islamic theme park.

    Unlike Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I cannot simply tap my heels together and get back to the imperfect but largely harmless familiarity of home. One more part of America has been allocated to another alien population – squatters who have been brought here to feed on us and to drive us out. But where do we have left to go? This isn’t progress – though it is progressive.

    This situation did not occur by accident. It is the product of a premeditated and deliberate social policy. When immigration is talked about on what sneeringly masquerades as news, it is always painted in fatalistic phrases that make it sound like an unstoppable force of nature – as though the people surging into America were a swarm of Mexican butterflies or a herd of East African wildebeests that had somehow overwhelmed the TSA.

    Snip.

    They did not aspire to be Americans in any remotely meaningful sense of the word. We have seen them, and we are not that stupid. The African populations seeded in Columbus, Minneapolis, and many other places did not come here to learn our culture or our values. They were not blown here in some unavoidable freak storm, nor did they wander here in search of missing livestock. They were certainly not brought here centuries ago as hapless and unwilling slaves. People from Washington, Boston, San Francisco and New York have sponsored this invasion – people who staff committees and think tanks, people who show the residents of the heartland the same loving concern that the Jackson administration showed the Cherokee.

  • Human smugglers: extortion and death threats. (Hat tip: Governor Greg Abboyy’s Twitter feed.)
  • Are Democrats wavering on a border wall?
  • Luke Rosiak’s book on the Awan case, Obstruction of Justice: How the Deep State Risked National Security to Protect the Democrats, is out next week. I intend to pick up a copy.
  • How National Review stepped in it in the rush to denounce the Covington kids:

    It seemed way out of character for [Nick] Frankovich to author an angry post about the Covington Catholic High School incident just as the details were emerging. His article—”The Covington Students Might As Well Have Just Spit on the Cross”—went online in the middle of the night on National Review’s portal for short posts by contributors. Frankovich harshly condemned the students, referred to their actions as evil and sadistic, and questioned their Christianity.

    “They mock a serious, frail-looking older man and gloat in their momentary role as Roman soldiers to his Christ. Bullying is a worn-out word and doesn’t convey the full extent of the evil on display here,” the deputy online editor wrote. He included accusations that had not yet been confirmed.

    On Sunday afternoon, as the media’s narrative fell apart and the reality of the situation came into view, National Review quietly removed Frankovich’s article from its website. Rich Lowry, the outlet’s editor, explained in a very brief post that he and Frankovich had been duped by a “hoax” and that Frankovich’s “strongly worded post” had been taken down. Lowry also deleted a few of his own tweets that inaccurately portrayed the incident.

    That was it. Rather than acknowledge that the editor and deputy editor for a once reliable and thoughtful conservative magazine were complicit in mob-shaming teenage boys attending a pro-life rally, they quickly excused their behavior as nothing more than gullibility. There was no apology, save for this quasi mea culpa. There was no “calling out” other conservatives who also had participated in the viral assault on innocent young boys.

    Two NRO articles addressed the the media’s malfeasance in the matter. In particular, “Nathan Phillips Lied, The Media Bought It,” wrote Kyle Smith.

    But the fact that editors for National Review also bought into the various lies escaped mention. This also included senior editor Jay Nordlinger, who deleted a January 19 tweet that read, “the images of those red-hat kids surrounding and mocking that old Indian are unbearable. Absolutely unbearable. An American disgrace.” Jonah Goldberg hand-waved away Frankovich’s vicious post as just “different people reaching different conclusions or having different opinions.”

    Snip.

    When confronted with evidence, there is no real apology or soul-searching. The public and the maligned families are just supposed to accept their vague, “oops, my bad” tweets and move on.

    Further, the same crowd of call-out conservatives, the nags who constantly are telling us which Republican lawmaker or presidential aide or Fox News anchor must be reprimanded for one imagined offense or another, have been silent on calling out their own tribe for joining the Covington High School outrage mob. Where is David French “calling out” his pal, Bill Kristol, for his two (deleted) tweets about the kids, including calling them “MAGA brats”? Where are the Referees of the Right demanding that Ana Navarro or Ben Howe or Jennifer Rubin apologize for vilifying innocent kids? Where are the conspiracy trackers like Jim Swift condemning Jim Swift for peddling this fiction? And why isn’t one conservative demanding that S.E. Cupp be fired from CNN for slandering these kids on her program? (She unconvincingly apologized on Twitter on Monday.)

    To be fair, French did address the issue in this piece. (Hat tip: Evil Blogger Lady via The Other McCain.)

  • It turns out that openly wishing for the deaths of children who hold different political views than you do is a career-limiting decision. Who knew?
  • MSM lies about Trump supporters again. Clip and save this sentence for reuse…
  • Let the lawsuits begin! (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Press That Sicced Mob On Teenagers Based On 10-Second Video Clip Unsure Why Some People Call Them ‘Fake News.'”
  • Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and other media outlets announced layoffs. Maybe those outlets should consider, oh, I don’t know, not treating half their potential audience with naked contempt?
  • Ace of Spades had some pungent observations on journalists and Twitter:

    As Mollie Hemingway has said several times, Twitter did improve transparency, and that transparency in turn reduced trust in media.

    You showed yourselves for what you really are. We noticed. We adjusted our estimates of you according to the new information.

    The thing is, what twitter exposed was not that you were leftwing. We already knew that.

    What Twitter exposed was that you were also dumb, easily duped, eager to believe self-justifying conspiracy theories, thin-skinned, arrogant, incompetent, disgracefully lazy, psychologically (and almost certainly physically) inadequate, dunderheadedly unimaginative and unwilling to consider any idea not within the braindead leftwing Incela Corridor Conventional Wisdom Bubble, prone to the most cowardly go-along-to-get-along sort of groupthink, and weak.

    Before Twitter, you were removed from us. Anyone who’s removed seems exalted. We knew you were leftwing political operators, but, and I hate to admit this, your remoteness made you seem like you were… elite.

    Now we’ve seen what you really are. You’re C- minus students and fat-assed pencil pushers with a nose for sniffing out the right dicks to suck.

    Stop holding back and tell us what you really think!

  • The six axioms of Social Justice Warrioring. (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott on Instapundit.)
  • “Ilhan Omar Endorsed Somalia’s New President. Four Days Later, Omar’s Brother-in-Law Had a Powerful Job in His Administration.” Naturally Nancy Pelosi has given her a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Thanks to Intersectionality, Democrats are exploring bold new frontiers in graft! (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “What if the FBI Had Probed Obama for Collusion with Iran?”
  • The Supreme Court has agreed to review New York City’s draconian gun laws.
  • David Kopel has more on the case: “Since the Sullivan Act in 1911, New Yorkers must obtain a license to own a handgun. As will be detailed below, the New York Police Department’s enforcement of the Sullivan Act was abusive from the very start, and has generally remained so ever since.” (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
  • In China, it’s not enough for Communist Big Brother to know you’re in debt, he has to let everyone around you know you’re in debt as well.
  • Germany catches an Iranian spy.
  • This just in: Shelia Jackson Lee is still a scumbag. And no longer leader of the Congressional Black Caucus.
  • Cahnman is a big fan of Speaker Dennis Bonnen’s committee assignments.
  • Powerline has a nice meme roundup of last week’s news. I’ll swipe a couple:

  • Could Alzheimer’s be caused by…gum disease? (Hat tip: David Shirpley on Twitter.)
  • Facebook is building an orbital death ray. Because they just weren’t evil enough before…
  • The fraudster behind the Fyre Festival.
  • Feel good story: A Puppy Saved From A Fire Becomes A Firefighter. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas | No Comments »

    Daily Kos: Man, We Sure Love Us Some Old White Heterosexual Millionaires!

    Wednesday, January 9th, 2019

    Lefty site DailyKos has released their first Presidential straw poll of 2019. Results?


    ELIZABETH WARREN 22%
    BETO O’ROURKE 15
    KAMALA HARRIS 14
    JOE BIDEN 14
    BERNIE SANDERS 11
    UNSURE 9
    OTHER 9
    CORY BOOKER 3
    JULIAN CASTRO 1
    KRISTEN GILLIBRAND 1

    So: Of their top five choices, all are straight, four are white millionaires, three are men, three will be over the age of 71 on January 20, 2021, two will be 78 or older, and none are Hispanic.

    The outliers are Kamala Harris, 55, with a net worth of $3,310,537 (a neat trick for someone who has been continuously in government positions since 1990), and Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, 46, with an estimated worth of only $9 million. (Forbes wants us to know that his father-in-law, William Sanders, is probably only worth a mere $500 million. Also, as far as I can tell, William Sanders is not related to Bernie Sanders.)

    The low ranking of Bernie Sanders may be a surprise to those who don’t follow every twist and turn of leftwing politics, but Kos deliberately drove out the Bernie Brigades in 2016 for the high crime of complaining about Hillary rigging the primary.

    So too is the high standing of Warren, whose “Hey, I’m just a common person drinking beer” Instagram video drew such ridicule, surprising.

    For all that Democrats swear up and down they’re the party of “people of color,” and the heavy influence of SJW “intersectionality” on the party’s rhetoric, four out of their top five Presidential candidates sure don’t show it.

    Maybe the real driver of the Democratic Party isn’t intersectionality, but middle-aged feminists looking for the next Hillary. (And maybe the young feminists find O’Rourke “dreamy.”)

    Or maybe I just don’t know enough about Daily Kos biases relative to the rest of the left in 2019. 2016 showed that lots of accepted wisdom about who shows up to vote for who in presidential election primaries was wrong.

    Or maybe straw polls this far out are simply meaningless. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Ben Carson were mopping up straw poll victories back in 2015…

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Social Justice Warriors | No Comments »

    Tucker Carlson on Rick Wilson Slamming Trump Voters

    Monday, January 7th, 2019

    The “Inbred Redneck Freaks of JesusLand” liberal putdown is alive and well in “Republican” political consultant Rick Wilson, calling the border wall “a con for Donald Trump’s credulous rube ten-toothed base.” (Did anyone else recognize this guy’s name before cable news started putting him on after Trump took the Republican field by storm? I didn’t even have a tag for him before this post.)

    Tucker Carlson lets him have it:

    Remember when the left pretended to care about working for the downtrodden? That was before the downtrodden voted for Donald Trump.

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    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, video | 1 Comment »

    Louis C.K. and the Social Justice War on Comedy

    Monday, December 31st, 2018

    This is the Louis C. K. comedy routine than has the usual Social Justice Warrior “That’s not funny!” scolds in a tizzy this morning (NSFW, just in case you were unclear on that part):

    “You didn’t get shot! You pushed some fat kid in the way, and now I have to listen to you?”

    Back when I was doing standup comedy in the 1980s, this wouldn’t have even raised an eyebrow. Setting aside Louis C.K.’s sleazy (but non-indictable) exhibitionist masturbation, it’s curious to see someone who cheerfully violated taboos both left and right suddenly subjected to the standard SJW Five Minute Hate Mob for material so comparatively mild.

    Remember all the conservative calls to end Louis C.K.’s career after he talked about wanking off on 9/11?

    Yeah, me neither.

    One can only imagine the outrage if the SJW were freshly presented with really transgressive comedy routines from the likes of Lenny Bruce, Red Foxx, Robin Williams, Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks or Sam Kinison. One can imagine that the accidental broadcast of an Andrew Dice Clay concert might result in San Francisco burning to the ground.

    The collision course between Social Justice Warrior ideology and comedy has been a long time coming, sweeping in everything from Monty Python to Bill Burr and everything in-between.

    So the right gets to own all comedy from now on? I’m fine with that. We’ll get Blazing Saddles and Archer and South Park and the left gets to keep Kathy Griffin and drum circles.

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    Posted in Social Justice Warriors, video | No Comments »

    Diana Fleischman and Jonathan Pie on the Gender Pay Gap Myth

    Sunday, December 30th, 2018

    Diana Fleischman is an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Portsmouth. (Also, when she was going to graduate school at UT Austin many years ago, we dated very briefly.) Here she is debunking the gender pay gap myth.

    She’s only in the first three minutes or so, the rest of the discussion features other people, including Andrew Doyle, the producer for Tom Walker’s “Jonathan Pie” fake British telejournalist videos. Here’s the Pie sex gap video they reference above:

    They also interview Kate Andrews from the Institute for Economic Affairs and Joanna Williams, a Senior Lecturer at University of Kent.

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    Why No New Housing Gets Built in San Francisco

    Saturday, December 29th, 2018

    A property owner spent nearly 5 years and $1.4 million trying to convert his laundromat into new housing in San Francisco’s Mission district, only to find that city’s far left political establishment hates letting new housing be built.

    And they wonder why San Francisco has a homeless problem…

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    Posted in Democrats, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, video | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for December 28, 2018

    Friday, December 28th, 2018

    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.

  • Kevin D, Williamson follows the idiots of antifa around the streets of Portland. That is, when they weren’t accidentally following him:

    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.

  • The psychological warfare campaign we carried out against Islamic State troops in the field.
  • National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy on the Syrian pullout:

    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.

  • Kurt Schlichter on the return of Trump the Disrupter:

    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…

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Paradoxically, U.S.-China trade has exploded recently.
  • The Wall Street Journal takes down the Washington Post‘s shoddy reporting of President Donald Trump’s visit with the troops:

    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.

    (Hat tip: Brit Hume on Twitter.)

  • Related:

  • Sad news: Austin’s own Richard Overton, America’s oldest living vet, died yesterday at age 112.
  • A roundup of how many anti-#GamerGate “journalists” turned out to be scumbag sexual abusers themselves.
  • 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.]
  • “Previously Deported Honduran Child-Sex Offender Arrested in Texas.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • 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.”
  • Mexico Beach, Florida: a tough road to recovery.
  • Speaking of Brit Hume: Six days after hip replacement surgery and he’s already walking around:

  • “Man Bravely Abandons Unpopular Christian Belief To Affirm Extremely Popular Cultural Belief.”
  • Heh:

  • “Theyyy’rrrree Heeeere…”

    Let’s hope Stark gets the nuke back through the portal before it closes…

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    Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »

    Bill Burr and Joe Rogan on Outrage Culture

    Sunday, December 23rd, 2018

    Bill Burr and Joe Rogan discuss social justice warriors, outrage culture and the death of comedy.

    Also a look at the feminist trying to to get an adjust professor fired.

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    Posted in Social Justice Warriors, video | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for December 21, 2018

    Friday, December 21st, 2018

    Welcome to the Winter Solstice LinkSwarm! Real news is popping everywhere, so try to hang on:

  • Hail the departing Mad Dog.
  • President Donald Trump says no to a continuing resolution with no border wall funding, so the House does an about-face and approves $5 billion worth. Now up to the Senate.
  • Related tweet:

  • Chinese hackers have penetrated deep into the navy:

    Chinese hackers are breaching Navy contractors to steal everything from ship-maintenance data to missile plans, officials and experts said, triggering a top-to-bottom review of cyber vulnerabilities.

    A series of incidents in the past 18 months has pointed out the service’s weaknesses, highlighting what some officials have described as some of the most debilitating cyber campaigns linked to Beijing.

    Cyberattacks affect all branches of the armed forces but contractors for the Navy and the Air Force are viewed as choice targets for hackers seeking advanced military technology, officials said.

    Navy contractors have suffered especially troubling breaches over the past year, one U.S. official said.

    The data allegedly stolen from Navy contractors and subcontractors often is highly sensitive, classified information about advanced military technology, according to U.S. officials and security researchers. The victims have included large contractors as well as small ones, some of which are seen as lacking the resources to invest in securing their networks.

    One major breach of a Navy contractor, reported in June, involved the theft of secret plans to build a supersonic anti-ship missile planned for use by American submarines, according to officials. The hackers targeted an unidentified company under contract with the Navy’s Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I.

    The hackers have also targeted universities with military research labs that develop advanced technology for use by the Navy or other service branches, according to analysis conducted by cyber firms as well as people familiar with the matter.

  • 33 convictions for voter fraud in Texas in 2018.
  • How Social Justice Warrioring and Trump Derangement Syndrome destroy literary friendships:

    While Brooklyn is known for liberal silos such as Park Slope and Williamsburg, the Brooklyn I’d known as a child was politically diverse. A number of my former classmates and colleagues remain Republicans. And some of them have come to my aid at the darkest, most tragic times in my life. Many are still my friends. They are police officers, nurses and combat veterans; they are Jews, immigrants, Asians, Latinos and African-Americans. Some would vote for Donald Trump: Conservative Jews who liked his pro-Israel stance; Wall Street workers who liked his business background; rank-and-file police who wanted to stick it to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio; visible minorities who liked his “America First” rhetoric, and imagined that he’d bring back secure manufacturing jobs. These promises may have been empty and dishonest. But they resonated with a lot of people, not all of them “troglodytes.”

    I also witnessed something else that alarmed me. The charges of Russian collusion against Trump’s campaign—while being a completely legitimate (and ongoing) political concern—were curdling into Russophobic hysteria among some members of the New York literary caste.

    “I think Russians have been at the root of our discord for years,” Daniel announced at one point. “I think they own the government and the NRA.…They are the true enemy…Seriously, #russia, fuck you.” Caught up in these negative reveries, he would lapse into Swiftian absurdism, declaring at one point, “I hope we deport every single one of you motherfuckers back to Russia where you’ll live in gulags.” Eventually, Twitter deleted Daniel’s account after he allegedly posted threatening tweets against other users.

    On another occasion, after I refused to discuss my Soviet immigration experience via Facebook and suggested we talk in person instead, the daughter of a renowned American novelist told me to “honestly fuck off. Go translate media monitoring kits for Trump… How did you all get into our country? Jesus Christ…You are a great reason why we need immigration reform now.”

    As a New York writer, I’m supposed to be reflexively hostile to Trump voters—a political breed that often is caricatured as a bunch of racist Appalachian hillbillies. But because of what I do for a living, and who my friends are, I’ve learned that Trump’s enemies can be every bit as Manichean and hysterical as Trump’s supporters.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Americans are tired of political correctness say those infamous right-wingers at NPR:

    Americans are largely against the country becoming more politically correct.

    Fifty-two percent of Americans, including a majority of independents, said they are against the country becoming more politically correct and are upset that there are too many things people can’t say anymore. About a third said they are in favor of the country becoming more politically correct and like when people are being more sensitive in their comments about others.

    That’s a big warning sign for Democrats heading into the 2020 primaries when cultural sensitivity has become such a defining issue with the progressive base.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Of state temperature records, only nine states have set high temperature records in the last fifty years, but fifteen have set cold temperature records. Hmmm.
  • “Journalists working as factcheckers for Facebook have pushed to end a controversial media partnership with the social network, saying the company has ignored their concerns and failed to use their expertise to combat misinformation.” So Facebook evidently hates its own fact-checkers as much as it hates its users…
  • TPPF approves of the First Step Act.
  • Martha McSally to replace John Kyl in the senate.
  • Drones shutdown Gatwick airport. When they find the asshole responsible, instead of trying him, they should just turn him over to the people whose flights he’s delayed…
  • Socialist wave isn’t.
  • Followup from last week’s LinkSwarm: “College Student Running for Office Finally Beats the Chicago Machine.
  • “A prominent ‘Republican’ women’s political action committee that regularly receives national media attention for its criticisms of President Donald Trump and the GOP is bankrolled by three liberal billionaire donors and activists, Federal Election Commission filings show.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Indian government to intercept, monitor, and decrypt citizens’ computers.”
  • So what were congressional Democrats doing on an unpublicized trip to Qatar? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Social justice and the death gap.
  • “Trump Criticized For Breaking With Longstanding American Tradition Of Remaining In Middle Eastern Countries Indefinitely.”
  • How Fox changed the landscape of television by unexpectedly landing the NFL.
  • The story of Charles Barkley’s long friendship with a Chinese immigrant cat litter scientist. (Hat tip: Iowahawk.)

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Military, Republicans | No Comments »

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