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December 2018

THE TYRANNY OF “EXPERTS”- DARYL McCANN

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/12/the-tyranny-of-experts/https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/12/the-tyranny-of-experts/

One of the many virtues of Salvatore Babones’ The New Authoritarianism is its dissection of ‘progressive’ liberalism, a political philosophy that assumes the task of ‘administering freedom’. When it comes to re-engineering society as the Left would prefer, there is no shortage of solons or arrogant presumption.

The New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism, and the Tyranny of Experts
by Salvatore Babones
Polity, 2018, 128 pages, $21.95
_______________________________

Salvatore Babones’s The New Authoritarianism is an important book. The central proposition is that a class of experts, an illiberal liberal elite, has hijacked representative democracy in America (and Western nation-states in general). Our new masters, though tyrannical and radical, are not Marxist or Fabian in the customary sense of championing ordinary working people. They despise ordinary people or “everyday great American patriots” as Donald Trump refers to them. The new authoritarians, well-travelled, well-educated and well-heeled, are intent on refashioning the West according to their own “liberal worldview”. Brilliantly insightful and always fair-minded, The New Authoritarianism is a compelling insider’s account of how the liberal-minded became close-minded.

Babones must be something of a class traitor, given that he himself belongs to the expert class as Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. The New Authoritarianism, remarkably, is an expert casting a coolly authoritative eye over latter-day liberalism and finding it tarnished by a desire to dominate, adjudicate and legislate every aspect of our lives. The customary role of liberalism, according to Babones, was not to vanquish the other two strains of political thought, progressivism and conservatism. Liberalism, as one-time stalwart of the British Liberal Party Winston Churchill opined, should be an integral part of a constructive tension between the status quo/stability and change/progress. The true liberal thinker, sophisticated and broad-minded, appreciates that not all change creates progress and that reactionary intransigence does not guarantee stability.

CORBYN CALLS MAY “A STUPID WOMAN”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/12/19/did-stupid-man-say-stupid-woman-least-break-brexit/
Did a stupid man say ‘stupid woman’? Well, at least it’s a break from Brexit

Michael Deacon

Please, in your prayers tonight, spare a thought for the disciples of Jeremy Corbyn. They’ve been having the most miserable time, frantically trying to agree on the most plausible excuse.

“No, of course he didn’t call Theresa May a ‘stupid woman’!”

“All right, he did say it – but it’s not sexist, because it’s true!”

“Anyway Tories can’t complain about sexism, because Tories are sexist!”

“And what about austerity! And arms sales! And Israel! And BBC bias! And—”

The funny thing is, I’m not sure anyone actually saw it at the time – in the Commons, at any rate. There was no immediate outcry from MPs. Instead, they saw it minutes later, while idly browsing their phones. There it was, all over Twitter: a video clip of Jeremy Corbyn appearing to mouth “Stupid woman” at the Prime Minister.

Yes, really: Jeremy Corbyn, that paragon of progressive virtue, captured on camera spitting a sexist insult. From up in the gallery, you could see it spread across the chamber: MPs on both sides goggling at their screens, and then showing their neighbours. On the Labour side, little huddles formed and swapped anxious whispers. Perhaps they were brainstorming an explanation for their leader to use. “Actually Mr Speaker, what I said was ‘Stupendous woman.’ Despite our differences politically, I can’t help but admire the Prime Minister for the way that, in deeply trying circumstances, she always—”

The first MP to mention it out loud was Paul Scully (Con, Sutton & Cheam). Did Mrs May, he asked, think it was acceptable for an MP to use the phrase “stupid woman”?

Mrs May had been busy answering questions, so she couldn’t have seen the video, but a colleague must have passed her a note about it, because she seemed to know what Mr Scully was alluding to. All MPs, she said darkly, with just the briefest glance in the direction of Mr Corbyn, “should use appropriate language when referring to female members”.

To which Mr Corbyn, believe it or not, nodded earnestly, and mouthed: “Quite right.”

Islamist terrorists suspected in murder of Scandinavian tourists in Morocco

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/12/19/islamist-terrorists-suspected-murder-scandinavian-tourists-morocco/

Two Scandinavian tourists killed in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains were the victims of a terrorist attack, prosecutors believe.

One man has been arrested following the discovery on Monday of the bodies of 24-year-old Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, from Denmark, and Maren Ueland, 28, from Norway.

One of the women had been beheaded, a source told AFP.

A suspect in the murder was arrested in Marrakech on Tuesday, and was known to have ties to radical Islamist terror networks.

Police are hunting for three other suspects.
Louisa Vesterager Jespersen
Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, who was found dead on Monday in Morocco

Boubker Sabik, a police spokesman, said terrorism was suspected and that the three suspects on the run had been “identified and a search for them is under way by all the security services”.

One of the three had “a court record linked to terrorist acts”, he said, while the prosecutor general’s office said the man in custody also belonged to an extremist group.

“Radical Islam is not ruled out, due to the profile of the suspect arrested and of the three men wanted,” a source close to the investigation told AFP.

The women’s bodies were found in an isolated area near Imlil, on the way to Toubkal, North Africa’s highest peak and a popular hiking destination.

How Historians Will See Canary Mission Years From Now Exposing some of the most venomous hate speech on the internet. Edwin Black

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272274/how-historians-will-see-canary-mission-years-now-edwin-black

On a recent Thursday, at about 8 am, on a desk illuminated by light from a nearby window, a paper cup of steaming coffee laden with cream and sugar was nudged near an open laptop, thus beginning a ten-to-twelve-hour day of mind-numbing monitoring by a Canary Mission [CM] staffer at one of the organization’s several locations. In endless social media searches, refreshes, clicks, video reviews, forwards and saves, the Canary Mission staffer will capture the worst of the openly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions agitation and hate speech erupting all across America’s campuses. Their work also encompasses white nationalism.

BDS advocates often spew some of the most venomous hate speech visible on the Internet, hate speech that Canary Mission captures and re-publishes in personal profiles. For example, the tweet by a Chicago activist with Students for Justice in Palestine who tweeted this joke: “Why did Hitler commit suicide?…….. He saw the gas bill. Pahhahaha.” Or the UCLA protestor whose Twitter account was captured with this remark: “Mmmaaaannnnnnnnnnn what’s with all this peaceful approaches!?? F**k that. I want terrorism and another intifada.” The same UCLA student reportedly added a photo close-up of a gun and bullets.

After the massacre at Pittsburgh, calls went out broadly to monitor, spotlight, and report hate speech, especially since hateful acts of violence are often preceded by hate speech. That is precisely what Canary Mission does. Canary Mission tracks social media and videos, capturing BDS, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic expressions, triangulating them into individual profiles that expose and create permanent, highly-visible records of the words and images BDS and SJP leaders actually use. The profiles are almost always incontestable since CM links to actual videos, tweets and other open documentation. Canary Mission’s intent is to shine an indelible light on students, faculty, and others, thus creating a negative incentive or at least a consequence for anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hate speech.

Canary Mission began in 2015 with just 50 profiles. By December 2018, about 2,500 profiles have been listed. CM has received about 80-100 requests for removal. Very few have been made. One staffer explained, “Even small errors are exceptionally rare due to our strict internal protocols. On the handful of occasions that we found an error, we made an immediate correction.”

California ICE Capades Crackdown on sheriffs, comfort for criminal illegals. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272282/california-ice-capades-lloyd-billingsley

In California’s capital, sheriff Scott Jones has been under fire for allegedly resisting oversight. This week the Sacramento County sheriff revealed the real reason for the campaign against him.

“It’s no secret,” he told county supervisors, “I give ICE unfettered access to our jails and our databases.” That was a problem because county supervisors voted in July to cancel the sheriff’s contract with ICE, and it also raised issues of compliance with Senate Bill 54, the state’s sanctuary law.

“I’ve been portrayed horribly, like I split up families and like I’m a Trump guy, and we’re all buddies,” Jones told reporters last year. So he brought ICE director Thomas Homan to a Sacramento forum to explain “factual information” about federal policy. Jones had no problem with immigrants but explained, “it’s the people in the jail, the people that choose a career of crime, we have to get rid of those folks.”

In 2015, Jones told Fox News that “by ICE’s own numbers, 95 percent of the people they used to arrest, that they’ve already identified, that they want to take custody of, are getting out of jail before they can get to them. And that’s scary, because they’re criminals. They’ve demonstrated a propensity for criminal behavior.” The real back story to Jones’ concern came in October of 2014.

Repeat deportee Luis Bracamontes, gunned down Sacramento deputy Danny Oliver and detective Michael Davis. The murder of two police officers prompted no statement from California governor Jerry Brown or Kamala Harris, attorney general at the time. Both failed to lament the “gun violence” on display in the case.

In court, with relatives of the victims present, Bracamontes said “I wish I had killed more of the motherfuckers.” Also present was Anthony Holmes, whom Bracamontes had shot five times when he refused to give up his car. Bracamontes called Holmes a “nigger,” and yelled “black lives don’t matter!” at the jury. As it happens, Danny Oliver’s wife Susan is also African American.

Jones fulfilled a promise to her by making a video urging the president to secure the borders. That didn’t happen and Jones got no support from California’s political and judicial establishments. They showed more interested in protecting illegals, even violent, racist criminals like Bracamontes, who was not supposed to be in the United States in the first place.

The Muslim Immigrant: The Icon of Oppressed Humanity An interview with Shillman Fellow Bruce Thornton. Niram Ferretti

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272240/muslim-immigrant-icon-oppressed-humanity-niram-ferretti

Editor’s note: Below is a translated interview with Frontpage’s Shillman Fellow, Bruce Thornton, with Niram Ferretti in the Italian magazine Foglio Quotidiano.

Ferretti: Professor Thornton, in 1984, French philosopher Pascal Bruckner wrote Le sanglot de l’homme blanc, his essay in which he showed how the West, from the Sixties onwards, has been engulfed in an apotheosis of self-guilt. The bottom line is that Western civilization is nothing more than a tale full of sound and fury, while the Third World is the innocent victim of its rapacity and evil. What are the reasons, according to you, of this cultural landscape?

Thornton: There are three developments behind what we can call Third Worldism. First, increasing contact with the undeveloped world through colonialism exposed Europeans to exotic peoples whom they idealized as superior to their own more developed and repressed lives. Next, Marxism, having been rejected by the European proletariat, turned to the anticolonial revolutionary movements in the Third World to find a substitute revolutionary vanguard. Now the revolution would be spearheaded by Third World peoples rather than the workers. And it made the Third World into a useful club for attacking liberal democratic and capitalist countries. Finally, Romanticism and the cult of sentimentalism in the West, aided by globalized communication media, found the Third World an object of “compassion” and guilt, which mass media turned into a commodity of suffering that Westerners could consume and vicariously enjoy those feelings without any efforts to ameliorate it. The result is cheap sentiment and guilt serving the Marxist ideology of undermining Western culture.

Ferretti: “Oppressor”, “Oppressed”, this seems to be the main dichotomy internal to most of political and cultural discourse, both here in Europe and in the United States. European and American universities, to a great extent, have espoused cultural Marxism. Is the battle lost?

Flynn: Fact, and Narrative By Andrew C. McCarthy

The FBI did not treat Flynn fairly, but while the Bureau’s situational ethics leave much to be desired, its aggressive tactics did not violate the law.

So. . . it turns out Michael Flynn was not sentenced on Tuesday.

No sentence does not mean no drama. We were treated to the notoriously unscripted Judge Emmet Sullivan suggesting that Flynn might somehow be guilty of “treason.” Now, I’ll grant you, being an unregistered agent of a foreign power is not a good thing (there’s even a law against it). But it’s tough to fathom how a judge could spin such a thing into treason when (a) the foreign power, Turkey in this case, is a NATO ally (at least technically), (b) General Flynn was not a U.S. government official when he acted as Ankara’s agent, (c) the prosecutor did not think it was an important enough crime to charge against Flynn, (d) Flynn is a decorated 33-year combat veteran who has written a book detailing a strategy for defeating America’s actual enemies, and (e) the prosecutor, in fact, has proposed a sentence of no jail time for the process crime that was actually charged in the case.

After calling a brief time-out in the proceedings, a contrite Judge Sullivan returned to the bench and retracted his loopy treason comments. All in all, it was a disgraceful performance: Flynn’s is not a complicated case, yet Sullivan failed to have a grip on basic facts. Still, before postponing the former national-security adviser’s sentencing, Sullivan — however unwittingly — performed a useful service in deconstructing the competing Flynn narratives.

Narrative overwhelms fact in modern political discourse. Maybe this is a function of the information age and modern news programming: Information gushes at people like an open hydrant. They feel the need to process information thematically, if they are to process it at all. And the lines between fact-reporting and opinion-analysis have blurred.

In my weekend column, I contended that there are two narratives of the Flynn episode, and that neither is accurate. Flynn fans say he has been railroaded, that the case against him is entirely fabricated, and that he was extorted into pleading guilty in order to protect his family from further ruin. Flynn critics counter that he lied to the FBI, and that a longtime military officer and national-security pro who ran the Defense Intelligence Agency is well aware that it is a crime to lie to the FBI, case closed.

Where’s Tutu? By Bruce Bawer

https://pjmedia.com/trending/wheres-tutu/

Once upon a time, a large framed photograph of Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu hung on the wall of my living room in Manhattan. I wasn’t the one who put it there, but I never felt a moment’s inclination to take it down, either. As it happens, the person with whom I lived at the time worked for the Episcopal Church (ECUSA), which is a part of the Anglican Communion, and which is headquartered in New York City. At the time — and I assume this is still going on today — the ECUSA was pouring plenty of cash into the Anglican churches in Africa, and Tutu, who back then was a frequent visitor to New York and very chummy with the ECUSA honchos and with Episcopal clergy in the city, was an especially favored object of the ECUSA’s largesse.

In any event, my cohabitant idolized Tutu as a champion of peace, reconciliation, brotherhood, and human rights in the aftermath of apartheid. He even met Tutu once or twice, and after those encounters he was walking on air. He quite simply adored the man.

Of course, Tutu wasn’t the only big name associated with the end of apartheid. There was Nelson Mandela, who headed up the African National Congress, spent years in prison, and ended up President of South Africa. And there was Mandela’s predecessor as president, F.W. DeKlerk, who worked with Mandela to dismantle apartheid and eventually shared the Nobel Peace Prize with him in 1993. But before they won their Nobels, Tutu won his, in 1984, with the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee hailing his leading role in “the non-violent struggle for liberation” in his country, “a struggle in which black and white South Africans unite to bring their country out of conflict and crisis.” Tutu deserved the honor: this was a man who, respected by both black and white, was able to persuade South Africans of both races, through sheer nobility of spirit, to resist uncivilized impulses and take the high road.

In his Nobel Prize lecture, Tutu sounded a noble note:

Unless we work assiduously so that all of God’s children, our brothers and sisters, members of our one human family, all will enjoy basic human rights, the right to a fulfilled life, the right of movement, of work, the freedom to be fully human, with a humanity measured by nothing less than the humanity of Jesus Christ Himself, then we are on the road inexorably to self-destruction, we are not far from global suicide; and yet it could be so different.

When will we learn that human beings are of infinite value because they have been created in the image of God, and that it is a blasphemy to treat them as if they were less than this and to do so ultimately recoils on those who do this? In dehumanizing others, they are themselves dehumanized. Perhaps oppression dehumanizes the oppressor as much as, if not more than, the oppressed. They need each other to become truly free, to become human. We can be human only in fellowship, in community, in koinonia, in peace.

I hadn’t thought about Tutu for a long time, but he’s been on my mind lately because of the horrors that are currently underway in the Republic of South Africa. In March, that nation’s parliament voted overwhelmingly to confiscate farmland from whites without compensation. Mass appropriation of white-owned land by black marauders is already taking place on a wide scale. Families that helped build South Africa and that have tilled their acres for generations have now either had their property stolen already or are huddling in their boarded-up, fenced-in homes waiting for an armed mob to come take it from them. And the assailants aren’t stopping at mere thievery. They have committed acts of physical cruelty motivated purely by greed and race hatred.

Anti-Semitic Nation of Islam Receives Federal Funds To Proselytize to Federal Inmates By Debra Heine

https://pjmedia.com/trending/anti-semitic-nation-of-islam-receives-federal-funds-to-proselytize-to-federal-inmates/

Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the U.S. government “to teach religious study programs for federal prison inmates,” the Washington Examiner reported in an exclusive Wednesday. Since 2008, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and Department of Justice leaders have given at least $350,000 to Farrakhan’s black nationalist group according to records obtained by the Examiner.

The Anti-Defamation League calls Farrakhan “the lead­ing anti-Semite in Amer­ica,” who for 30 years “has espoused and promoted anti-Semitism and racism” and “has repeatedly alleged that the Jewish people were responsible for the slave trade, as well as the 9/11 attacks.”

The black nationalist preaches that white people are “blue-eyed devils” and Jews are “the synagogue of Satan,” and once even called Adolf Hitler “a very great man” who “raised Germany up from nothing.”

Farrakhan has long preached to his followers that “a mother wheel” hovers over the Earth — “a heavily armed” spaceship of death that will “rain destruction upon white America, but save those who embrace the Nation of Islam.”

“White folks are going down. And Satan is going down. And Farrakhan, by God’s grace, has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew and I’m here to say your time is up, your world is through,” said Farrakhan during a “Savior’s Day” address in February of this year. More recently, Farrakhan traveled to Iran where he called America the “great Satan” and led “death to America” chants.

Ironically, Farrakhan has instructed his followers to not accept money from the U.S. government. Said Farrakhan in a Dec. 14, 2013 statement: “If they offer you anything, look carefully into it, lest the Nation will no longer be tied to the principles that the Hon. Elijah Muhammad desired for us: to make us an independent nation on some of this Earth that we can call our own.”

Despite the group’s stated beliefs and intentions, Nation of Islam leaders “have received at least $364,500 in contracts and awards from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Justice between fiscal 2008 and fiscal 2019,” according to the report:

The funding was designed to provide “Nation of Islam religious services,” “Nation of Islam spiritual guide services,” “Nation of Islam study services,” and other related programming led by the organization’s leaders, according to Bureau of Prison records. The Nation of Islam has been labeled a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. CONTINUE AT SITE

Palestinian sentenced to death for preventing murder of Israeli children VIDEO

https://worldisraelnews.com/watch-palestinian-sentenced-to-death-for-preventing-murder-of-israeli-children/?utm_source=browser&utm_medium=push_notification&utm_campaign=PushCrew_notification_1545239958&pushcrew_powered=1

A Palestinian man describes the brutal torture he endured under the Palestinian Authority for preventing a terror attack against Israeli children.

He also discusses the virulent anti-Semitism in the PA and the humane treatment he received in an Israeli prison.