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February 2017

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Promises to Keep The “Law and Order” president hits the ground running. Michael Cutler

By on February 13th, 2017

During his campaign for the presidency Donald Trump frequently disdainfully scowled when he spoke about how most politicians were “All talk and no action.”

Candidate Trump promised that immigration would be a primary focus of his administration.

President Trump has indeed focused on multiple aspects of the immigration crisis that go well beyond building a wall along the U.S./Mexican border.

His selection of Senator Jeff Sessions to be his Attorney General was the best possible choice for this important position.

Sessions had chaired the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest.

Consider that on February 25, 2016 that subcommittee conducted a hearing on the topic, “The Impact of High-Skilled Immigration on U.S. Workers.”

When the Obama administration conducted meetings for “Stakeholders” on the immigration issue corporate leaders were invited to attend as were immigration lawyers representing illegal aliens and special interest groups that advocate for illegal aliens.

However, no one in attendance represented the “average American.”

Even the union leaders representing the Border Patrol, ICE agents and the adjudications officers were barred from participating in those meetings.

On February 9, 2017 President Trump held a news conference in the Oval Office to conduct a public swearing in ceremony of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Immediately after Vice President Pence swore in Jeff Sessions, President Trump signed three executive orders:

Presidential Executive Order on Enforcing Federal Law with Respect to Transnational Criminal Organizations and Preventing International Trafficking

Presidential Executive Order on Preventing Violence Against Federal, State, Tribal, and Local Law Enforcement Officers

Presidential Executive Order on a Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety

President Trump promised to be the “Law and Order” President and he has certainly hit the ground running.

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Leftism: From Bloody Tragedy to Therapeutic Parody But the danger is still as real as ever. Bruce Thornton

By on February 13th, 2017

Karl Marx famously said that historical facts and personages are repeated, first as tragedy, then as farce. But Marx could not have foreseen that the ideology he birthed would experience a third phase as well: therapeutic parody. The juvenile hysteria, tantrums, inflated “resistance,” and pointless vandalism of the left-wing Democrats are signs of leftism’s last phase. But that doesn’t make the left any less dangerous.

The “tragedy” wrought by the left is evident in its blood-stained history. The 100 million people murdered by purges and engineered famines were the victims of regimes founded on gulags, show-trials, lies, persecution, “re-education,” and censorship. Their deaths are one of history’s greatest tragedies. No more successful were the attempts to give collectivism “a human face” by creating the “soft despotism” of technocratic bureaucracies and agencies embodied in the EU and American progressivism, both increasingly sclerotic, ineffective, and desperate.

The “farce” came in the sixties, as one French ’68 leftist admitted in the famous graffito, “I am a Marxist, of the Groucho variety.” In less than a decade, the New Left’s embrace of hedonism and identity politics transformed it into a life-style choice and New Age cult for the affluent, pampered boomers rich enough to postpone adulthood indefinitely, and to avoid the consequences of their utopian fantasies. After a few spasms of terrorist attacks by outfits like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army, the tax-payer-subsidized graduate seminar and faculty lounge, not the factory floor or the terrorist cell, became the nursery of the “revolution.”

A booming economy subsidized whole hordes of such parlor pinks, caviar communists, and radical chic poseurs. They turned leftist slogans and symbols into status commodities that capitalists from Hollywood and Madison Avenue were eager to co-opt and profit from. “Revolution” meant wearing a Che t-shirt, rocking with The Clash, and reading Noam Chomsky, pop-cultural brands that camouflaged sexual hedonism, licentious individualism, and conspicuous consumption. Finally, the “long march through the institutions” created not the collectivist utopia, but privileged elites in media, academe, and government whose stock portfolios, bank accounts, affluent zip-codes, and tony life-styles were indistinguishable from those of the robber-baron capitalists they demonized.

Now farce has become parody. Despite its dominance of the media, academe, and popular culture, subsequent decades of politically correct commissars policing language and thought; coercive regulations and laws encroaching ever more insidiously into private life and civil society; and the monstrous hypocrisy of an “effete corps of impudent snobs” who exempted themselves from the intrusive big-government regime they imposed on others less privileged and connected, all led to the repudiation of farcical leftism.

By November 2016, the eight years of Obama’s lies and blunders pushed the left-wing farce to the breaking point. The failure of a leftist president’s hijacking of the economy, and his foreign policy disasters wrought by a stale “we are the world” internationalism finally roused our generation’s forgotten men and women to throw the lefty bums out. It did not help that the Dems’ anointed candidate was the epitome of the left’s hypocritical mash-up mixing worn-out leftist bromides and shibboleths, with rank ambition, unseemly money-grubbing, and entitled arrogance.

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IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germany’s Migrant Rape Crisis: January 2017 Tolerating a “rape culture” to sustain a politically correct stance on mass migration by Soeren Kern

By on February 13th, 2017

“Whoever behaves in his host country as the reports suggest has not only lost any claim to our hospitality but also their right to asylum!” — Mayoral candidate Volker Stein, Frankfurt.

The actual number of migrant-related sex crimes in Germany is at least two or three times higher than the official number. Only 10% of the sex crimes committed in Germany appear in the official statistics. — André Schulz, head of the Criminal Police Association.

An even more toxic practice is for police deliberately to omit any references to migrants in crime reports. This lapse makes it impossible for German citizens to understand the true scale of the migrant crime problem.

City police asked German media to delete any images of the suspect. A note for editors stated: “The legal basis for publishing the surveillance photos has been dispensed with. We strongly urge you to take this into account in future reporting and to remove and/or make changes to existing publications.”

“As a refugee, it is difficult to find a girlfriend.” — Asif M., a 26-year-old asylum seeker from Pakistan, in court on charges he raped one woman and attempted to rape five others.

German authorities are investigating reports that dozens of Arab men sexually assaulted female patrons at bars and restaurants in downtown Frankfurt on New Year’s Eve 2016.

The attacks, in which mobs of migrants harassed women in a “rape game” known as “taharrush gamea” (Arabic for “collective sexual harassment”), are said to have mirrored the mass sexual assaults of women in Cologne and other German cities on New Year’s Eve 2015.

Germans protesting the New Year’s Eve 2015 mass sexual assaults wave flags, alongside a banner saying “Rapefugees Not Welcome,” on January 9, 2016 in Cologne. (Image source: Getty Images)

A report published by Bild on February 5 alleged that some 900 migrants, many of whom were intoxicated, gathered at the central train station in Frankfurt on December 31, 2016. Police blocked their access to the Mainufer, a downtown pedestrian area along the Main River and the site of a large New Year’s celebration, so the migrants walked to the Fressgasse, another downtown pedestrian zone known for its restaurants and bars.

Witnesses said that groups of up to 50 migrants of “Arab or North African” appearance entered several establishments and began sexually assaulting female patrons. They also stole handbags and jackets, threw bottles and firecrackers, and, for good measure, finished their victims’ drinks.

Frankfurt Police insist they did not know about the incidents until Bild, the newspaper with the largest circulation in Germany, reported on them. It remains unclear why the victims waited more than a month before coming forward with their complaints. A police spokesperson said the claims are “worrying” and “cannot be excluded.”

Some say the incidents in Frankfurt harken back to those in Cologne, where police covered up the sexual assaults for several days, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments, until local media reported on them. Others question why no cellphone videos or photographs surfaced on social media to corroborate the claims.

Previously, the police in Frankfurt reported only one assault on New Year’s Eve: a 30-year-old migrant from Afghanistan attacked a 25-year-old woman at the Mainufer.

Frankfurt’s Mayor, Peter Feldmann, said: “There is zero tolerance for any abuses. I have great confidence in our police. They should always be contacted immediately. Only then can they do their work.”

Christoph Schmitt, security spokesman for the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), said: “It is unacceptable that women have been treated this way. If mobs of male refugees are making the city unsafe, then we need more police on the streets and more video surveillance.”

Mayoral candidate Volker Stein said: “While we had high contingent of police at the Main River, the rest of the city was left to the rampaging hooligans. Whoever behaves in his host country as the reports suggest has not only lost any claim to our hospitality, but also their right to asylum!”

Other German cities also reported sexual assaults on New Year’s Eve 2016, despite an increased police presence and crowds that were far smaller than on New Year’s Eve 2015.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Islamic Terror and the U.S. Temporary Stay on Immigration by Uzay Bulut

By on February 13th, 2017

It is short-sighted and reckless to blame President Trump for trying to protect his country and keep his country safe — as any good leader is supposed to do. It would be much wiser to direct our anger where it belongs — at Muslim extremists and Muslim terrorists.

To many people, it must be easier to go after the U.S. president than after ISIS terrorists. That way, critics of the president can also pose as “heroes” while ignoring the real threats to all of humanity.

Critics of Muslim extremists get numerous death threats from some people in the West because they courageously oppose the grave human rights violations — forced marriages, honor killings, child rape, murdering homosexuals and female genital mutilation (FGM), among others.

Why do we even call criticism of such horrific practices “courageous”? It should have been the most normal and ordinary act to criticize beheadings, mutilations and other crimes committed by radical Muslims. But it is not.

On the contrary, the temporary ban aims to protect genuine refugees such as Bennetta Bet-Badal, who was murdered in San Bernardino. It would be much wiser to direct our anger where it belongs — at Muslim extremists and Muslim terrorists.

In San Bernardino on December 2, 2015, 14 people were murdered and 22 others seriously wounded in a terrorist attack. The perpetrators were Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a married couple. Farook was an American-born U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, who worked as a health department employee. Malik was a Pakistani-born lawful permanent resident of the United States.

Among the victims of the terror attack was Bennetta Bet-Badal, an Assyrian Christian woman born in Iran in 1969. She fled to the U.S. at age 18 to escape Islamic extremism and the persecution of Christians that followed the Iranian revolution.

“This attack,” stated the Near East Center for Strategic Engagement (NEC-SE), “showcases how Assyrians fled tyranny, oppression, and persecution for freedom and liberty, only to live in a country that is also beginning to be subject to an ever-increasing threat by the same forms of oppressors.”

“NEC-SE would like to take this opportunity to once again urge action to directly arming the Assyrians and Yezidis and other minorities in their indigenous homeland, so that they can defend themselves against terrorism and oppression. This tragedy is evidence that the only way to effectively counter terrorism is not solely here in the US, but abroad and at its root.”

Members of the Islamic State (ISIS) have declared several times that they target “kafirs” (infidels) in the West.

In 2014, Syrian-born Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the official spokesperson and a senior leader of the Islamic State, declared that supporters of the Islamic State from all over the world should attack citizens of Western states, including the US, France and UK:

“If you can kill a disbelieving American or European – especially the spiteful and filthy French – or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way, however it may be.

“Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him.”

It is this barbarity that the new U.S. administration is trying to stop.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Great Humanistic Delusion by Philip Carl Salzman

By on February 13th, 2017

With the broadening of globalization, and the ever-larger flows of population to distant lands, diversity became not only more prevalent, but a quality to be desired, an inclusion of all varieties of humanity, an ethic.

The means of attaining this diversity is cultural relativism. Its thesis is that all ways of life are equally valid, and that judgement must be suspended absolutely and permanently. In acknowledging differences, we would potentially be opening discussion to insidious comparisons with claims that one culture might be preferable or others. Such evaluations would violate the cultural relativist principle that all cultures are equally valid and good.

If some people attack others in the name of Islam or jihad, we hear it as if they must be lacking the things that we would miss: steady jobs, nice houses, good cars. If some people who have immigrated to our home country murder our citizens, they must have suffered a lack of opportunity due to racism or “Islamophobia.” According to the humanistic delusion, violent people are despondent and desperate from not having the things that we have. And there is also a clear answer to stopping the attacks: give those folks the nice things that we like, so they will be content, be nice, and not try to take us over or blow us up.

We like to think that all people should be treated as equals, and regard religious prejudice as racism and discrimination on the basis of sexual preference with disdain. But in South Asia, the hierarchical caste system ranks people according to purity vs. pollution. Pakistan means “Land of the Pure”.

Finally, as members of the UN, we believe that countries should respect one another, and not interfere with one another; particularly, we think that warfare should be avoided. But does everyone think that?

Most people in North America and Western Europe cling to a very dangerous belief: that people are really all the same, that people everywhere want the same things, that people everywhere have the same values. And the things others want and value are the same things that we want and value. This is the great Western humanistic delusion: that everyone is the same, and everyone is like me.

Historically, people saw their encounters through a loyalty and pride in his or her family, clan, tribe, caste, class, nation, religion, and race, and to have suspicion and disdain for those of other families, clans, tribes, castes, classes, nations, religions, and races. Uniquely, in the West, after the Enlightenment, the idea of the “in” group broadened and broadened over time, so that by the second half of the 20th century, identity was increasingly with all of humanity. Anthropologists rejected race as a legitimate scientific category.

The positive side of the new framework of “all of humanity” can be seen in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights promulgated by the United Nations, and endorsed by most countries of the world. However, Saudi Arabia abstained from the ratification vote.

“Saudi Arabia’s stated reservations to the Universal Declaration were that its call for freedom of religion violated the precepts of Islam, and that the human rights guaranteed by the Islamic-based law of Saudi Arabia surpassed those secured by the Universal Declaration.”

In 1984, the Iranian representative to the United Nations, Said Rajaie-Khorassani, said that the Declaration was “a secular understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition” that could not be implemented by Muslims without conflict with Sharia.

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California to Pay Obama A.G. Eric Holder’s Law Firm $25,000 a Month for Anti-Trump ‘Legal Strategies’ by Andrew Eicher

By on February 13th, 2017

Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder’s law firm, Covington and Burling, will receive $25,000 a month from the California Legislature.

The fee is in exchange for 40 hours of work each month on providing “legal strategies regarding potential actions of the federal government that may be of concern to the State of California,” according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch.

In response to the documents, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said that California legislators are “wasting tax dollars to bankroll another corrupt politician – Eric Holder – under the pretense of attacking the Trump administration.”

The contract amounts to “crony corruption pure and simple,” Fitton said. “The swamp of public corruption has taken over California.”

Controversies such as Operation Fast and Furious and the Justice Department’s spying on the Associated Press marred Holder’s time as U.S. Attorney General.

In 2012, Holder became the first Attorney General held in contempt of Congress on both civil and criminal grounds for his role in the Fast and Furious, an ATF “gun-running” scheme in which guns were sold in the U.S. to Mexican drug cartels in hopes that they could be traced to cartels and crime scenes.

Even before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, California State Senators de León (D-Los Angeles) and Rendon (D-Paramount) announced in a joint statement that “…to protect California’s economy and our sensible policies on climate change, health care, civil rights, and immigration,” the Legislature has hired “an expert legal team…led by former United States Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.”

The contract with Covington and Burling, which Holder felt “honored” to receive, is limited to the firm providing “legal strategies.” Should the California Legislature wish to use the firm for litigation or public advocacy work, a new “engagement letter” would be required.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Speed Limits on Trump’s Infrastructure Drive: Federal Laws, Rare Species and Nimbys Environmental regulations and neighborhood opposition routinely bog down projects and will likely constrain the administration’s plan to spend $1 trillion on ‘highways, bridges, tunnels, airports’ By David Harrison

By on February 13th, 2017

Almost sixty years ago, officials at California’s transportation department unveiled a plan to build a six-mile freeway extension in Los Angeles County.

They are still working on it.

During the 1960s, the road plan appeared on track. In the 1970s, new environmental laws required voluminous studies and sparked legal fights between the neighboring towns of South Pasadena and Alhambra, which lie along its intended path. The project remains under review.
“I am totally for the national and statewide environmental laws,” said Hasan Ikhrata, executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments, who supports the extension project. Still, “sometimes it gets to be ridiculous.”
Many lawmakers and economists agree with President Donald Trump that America needs to fix a backlog of infrastructure needs, which the Transportation Department pegs at $926 billion. There’s a similar agreement that conservation and preservation laws have helped mitigate damage on neighborhoods and the environment.

A tour through of the nation’s thorniest infrastructure struggles shows how these two goals are often in conflict. As a result, long, costly reviews and legal battles will likely confront Mr. Trump’s efforts, just as they delayed much of President Barack Obama’s 2009 economic-stimulus efforts.

“You would have to fix some of these issues” said McKinsey & Co. partner Tyler Duvall, a DOT assistant secretary for policy in the George W. Bush administration, “in order to get the money into the system in a productive way.”

The president has yet to reveal details of his plan. On Jan. 24, Mr. Trump issued an executive order calling for expedited reviews on “high priority” projects. Before signing, he said: “We can’t be in an environmental process for 15 years if a bridge is going to be falling down or if a highway is crumbling.”

Any significant new infrastructure-spending package would have to clear Congress. And executive orders alone won’t do much to change a well-entrenched four-decade-old regulatory process, said Philip Howard, chairman of Common Good, a think tank favoring looser federal regulation. The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment.

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ISRAEL, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

TV’s ‘Homeland’: Alternative Facts About Settlements By: Joseph Schick

By on February 13th, 2017

In the latest episode of Showtime’s program “Homeland,” veteran senior CIA operative Saul Berenson visits his religious sister in a West Bank settlement. The two clash over his opposition to her living there, with Saul fuming, “Haven’t you driven enough people from their homes already? Bulldoze their villages, seized their property under laws they had no part in making?”
Saul’s sister responds as a stereotypical religious zealot would, offering no substantive response to his charges.

Like Mandy Patinkin – the actor who plays him who has expressed support for actors and artists who refused to perform in the settlement of Ariel – the character of Saul Berenson can certainly express his criticism of settlements. But as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan quipped, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”
The oft repeated charge Saul repeats – that settlements in Judea and Samaria are built on the ruins of bulldozed villages from which Arabs were driven from their homes – is completely false. Yet “Homeland” presented it to tens of millions of viewers as an uncontroverted fact.

Alas, this Big Lie has been repeated so many times that most people in the world have come to believe it – baselessly equating West Bank settlements with forced, violent dispossession of civilians from their homes, thereby maligning the more than 400,000 Israeli residents in Judea and Samaria.

The program’s showrunners – themselves longtime friends of Israel who have filmed portions of several episodes there – might even be among those who think this lie represents the truth, which only highlights how insidious this false narrative is.

In fact, in the still mostly empty West Bank, settlements were built alongside or across from Palestinian towns and villages. (Hebron is the only place inhabited by both Israelis and Arabs.) Palestinians were not expelled from their homes as a result of the construction of settlements, nor has any Arab village ever been bulldozed or otherwise evacuated in any way to make way for a settlement in Judea or Samaria.
Indeed, the last West Bank villages to be destroyed (aside from the four Jewish communities evacuated by Prime Minister Sharon in 2005), with people not merely driven from their homes but murdered, occurred in 1948 when Arabs looted and then completely destroyed all of the Jewish settlements in Gush Etzion, massacring 240 women and men.
As “Homeland” is a work of fiction, some might contend that no offense should be taken if its characters deviate from the truth in furtherance of dramatization. But that’s not the position the program itself has taken. Showrunners Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa have expressed their strong efforts to emphasize that the vast majority of Muslims – both in America and throughout the world – are peaceful. In seasons 3 and 4, the “Homeland” cast included a devout hijab-wearing woman who served America heroically and courageously as a CIA analyst.
Most recently in previewing the current season, Gansa and Gordon expressed their surprise and concern about allegations that “Homeland” has been offensive to Muslims, and discussed how that contributed to the current season’s storyline in which the show’s lead character has left the CIA to devote her efforts to assisting Muslim-Americans targeted by U.S. prosecutors.
The show’s lead producers are right to recognize that in today’s incendiary world, the entertainment industry should be thoughtful in the way it tells its stories and portrays characters. Sensitivity and nuance are vital and laudable.
This must not stop only when it comes to Israel, which is continuously defamed by its wide array of enemies and deserves much better than that from its friends. Disagreement with Israel’s policies – including its settlement policies – is absolutely legitimate. Subjecting Israel to slander that is broadcast to Showtime’s wide audience is not.
Joseph Schick

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Bravo to Ambassador Haley, for Blocking UN Ploy on ‘Palestine’ By Claudia Rosett

By on February 13th, 2017

On Thursday United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres sent the Security Council a letter nominating as the new head of the UN’s mission to Libya a former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad — who was described in the letter as “Salam Fayyad (Palestine).”

America’s new ambassador, Nikki Haley, said no. Having thus blocked Fayyad’s appointment, Haley then put out a statement explaining why:

For too long the UN has been unfairly biased in favor of the Palestinian Authority to the detriment of our allies in Israel. The United States does not currently recognize a Palestinian state or support the signal this appointment would send within the United Nations, however, we encourage the two sides to come together directly on a solution. Going forward the United States will act, not just talk, in support of our allies.

Haley’s statement is important not only for its broad message — that President Trump’s administration will steer by his pledges of support to Israel — but also for calling out Guterres on his not-so-subtle attempt to abet the UN’s long push to confer by increments on the Palestinian Authority a legitimacy it has not earned.

The UN spokesman’s office responded by Haley’s objection by sending out a statement that:

The proposal for Salam Fayyad to serve as the Secretary-General’s Special Representative in Libya was solely based on Mr. Fayyad’s recognized personal qualities and his competence for that position.

United Nations staff serve strictly in their personal capacity. They do not represent any government or country.

This UN claim is disingenuous in the extreme, as the UN spokesman’s office itself then underscored, in the rest of the same statement quoted just above, by saying:

The Secretary-General reiterates his pledge to recruit qualified individuals, respecting regional diversity, and notes that, among others no Israeli and no Palestinian have served in a post of high responsibility at the United Nations. This is a situation that the Secretary-General feels should be corrected, always based on personal merit and competencies of potential candidates for specific posts.

In other words, Secretary-General Guterres, while disavowing any interest in the origins or potential loyalties of any candidate for a UN post, is simultaneously claiming a special interest in appointing — specifically — Israelis and Palestinians. And — lo and behold — Guterres just happens to have kicked off this erstwhile neutral campaign by nominating to a high-level post not an Israeli, but a Palestinian. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Fly the Emotional Skies United Airlines Pilot Removed from Plane After Bizarre Election Rant By Michael Walsh !!!!????

By on February 13th, 2017

Passengers reportedly fled a flight before it could take off on Saturday — after a United Airlines pilot went on a bizarre rant over the intercom.

In a ball cap and casual shirt, the pilot remarked on her appearance after she boarded the flight at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in the late afternoon, passenger Randy Reiss wrote on Twitter.

21h
Randy Reiss @undeadsinatra

So, y’all. I’m shaking right now. I just left my @united flight 455 ‘cos the captain demonstrated that she was not mentally in a safe space.

“So I’ll stop, and we’ll fly the airplane,” she says in another passenger’s video. “Don’t worry. I’m going to let my co-pilot fly it. He’s a man.” Reiss got out of his seat, collected his bag and made for the exit. “Half the flight followed my lede,” he wrote.

“Okay, if you don’t feel safe get off the airplane, but otherwise we can go,” the pilot says in the video, still cheerful, as her passengers begin to revolt.

“Did I offend you?” she says to someone in first class.

“Disarm the doors,” a flight attendant says.

Whoa! Who says women are prone to hysteria under pressure?

United Airlines did not immediately reply to The Washington Post’s questions about the incident: who the pilot was, whether she would have been allowed to fly had her passengers not fled, and whether she had been disciplined. “We removed her from the flight,” a spokesman for the airline told the Austin American-Statesman. “We’re going to discuss this matter with her.”

Texas media has more:

United Airlines says it’s investigating after a pilot was removed from a San Francisco-bound flight before it left Austin, Texas, Saturday.

Passengers say the pilot wasn’t wearing a uniform when she boarded the plane. She got on the intercom system and reportedly talked about politics, the presidential election and her divorce. Passengers also say she asked for a vote on whether to change her clothes to her uniform or fly as is. At that point, about 20 passengers got off the plane because they felt uncomfortable.

United Airlines spokesman Charlie Hobart confirmed the pilot wasn’t in uniform when she boarded the plane Friday. He says another pilot was brought in and the flight was delayed about two hours. Hobart also confirmed the pilot was the woman shown in videos posted on social media talking to passengers over the intercom.

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