Displaying posts published in

January 2019

The Left’s Smirking MAGA Kid Hoax Progressives, lies and videotape. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272636/lefts-smirking-maga-kid-hoax-matthew-vadum

A video posted online over the weekend showing a teenaged Trump supporter’s awkward reaction to having his personal space aggressively invaded by a loud left-wing agitator sparked a leftist-led social media meltdown that will not soon be forgotten.

Nick Sandmann, a student from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, was at the Lincoln Memorial Friday after attending this year’s March for Life.

Sandmann, a white, male, heterosexual, pro-life, Catholic Trump supporter wearing a red pro-Trump “Make America Great Again” baseball cap was a perfect target for the nation’s howling outrage brigades.

Video showed an elderly Indian man named Nathan Phillips, who turns out to be a radical left-wing activist, getting too close for comfort to Sandmann who at times stared back at him or grinned. The videos of varying durations that surfaced of the encounter all show the same thing. Sandmann simply stood there and took the abuse, which consisted in part of having a drum pounded loudly in his face, from Phillips without responding. Phillips later lied to reporters about the incident and called the high school kids “beasts.” He also said, “It was racism. It was hatred. It was scary.”

Of course, it was none of those things, but getting a leftist to abandon his narrative is generally an impossible task.

Black radicals also participated in the incident at one of America’s most sacred spaces, yelling abuse at Sandmann and his classmates who responded with pep cheers. Leftists claimed the schoolchildren chanted “build the wall” as some kind of a racist insult but it never happened according to video footage.

Sandmann’s pleasant demeanor was taken by some to be an affront to Phillips, who claims to have served in the U.S. military at some indefinite point in the past.

But because Sandmann is a living embodiment of everything today’s Left’s despises –whites, males, straights, Catholics, and especially Trump supporters— somehow the young man’s remarkably restrained, mature posture turned into a threat to the republic in the minds of leftists.

The Art of The Disavowal By Helen Lamm

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/21/the-art

Prior to the Women’s March this year, controversy arose over its leaders’ relationships with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Meghan McCain pressed Tamika Mallory on “The View” last week, insinuating latent anti-Semitism because of this relationship with Farrakhan.

McCain held Mallory’s feet to the fire, pressing that she condemn Farrakhan for likening Jews to termites that promote homosexuality. She did not disavow. The conversation basically went like this:

Mallory: We did not make those remarks.

McCain: But you’re associating with a man who does publicly.

Mallory: What I will say to you is that I don’t agree with many of Minister Farrakhan’s statements.

McCain: Do you condemn them?

Mallory: I don’t agree.

McCain: But you won’t condemn it.

Mallory: No, to be very clear, it’s not my language. It’s not how I speak, it’s not how I organize . . . I should never be judged through the lens of a man.

Many conservatives on Twitter continue to take shots at the Women’s March for its leaders’ entanglements. But as it stands now, they haven’t suffered much. News coverage for the march was generally positive as usual. No one lost their livelihood over the claims, and it is entirely likely that the march will go on uninhibited again next year.

The March for Life, on the other hand, usually doesn’t make headlines. This year, video footage of an interaction between Covington Catholic High School students (in D.C. as part of a broad pro-life Catholic contingent) and a Native American drummer (there for the first-ever D.C. Indigenous People’s March) set the internet aflame, drawing harsh attention to the pro-life march for reasons unrelated to the movement itself.

Call-Out Conservatives Join the Left’s Lynch Mob By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/21/call-out-conservatives

When I first started writing for National Review in 2015, Nick Frankovich was my editor. He always was kind and professional, offering advice on how I could develop my nascent writing style. Although we never met in person, he appeared to be cautious and reserved. I know he is a man of deep faith and very devoted to the magazine William F. Buckley, Jr. founded in 1955.

So it seemed way out of character for 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.”

MY SAY: A NEW LOW AT THE NEW YORK TIMES BY RUTH KING

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/a_new_low_at_the_new_york_times.html

Martin Luther King was a noble man whose courage shattered the ceiling of racism in America. It is disgraceful that too many bigots and charlatans cloak themselves in his legacy to promote hatred. The latest example is a written tantrum, “Time to Break the Silence on Palestine,” by Michelle Alexander, who became a New York Times columnist in 2018.

Start with rote libel:

Our elected representatives, who operate in a political environment where Israel’s political lobby holds well-documented power, have consistently minimized and deflected criticism of the State of Israel, even as it has grown more emboldened in its occupation of Palestinian territory and adopted some practices reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow segregation in the United States.

“Well documented power” of the Jewish lobby are well known code words to evoke fantasies about surreptitious Jewish manipulation of politics.

Alexander then brings in brings in Martin Luther King with the following:

Reading King’s speech at Riverside more than 50 years later, I am left with little doubt that his teachings and message require us to speak out passionately against the human rights crisis in Israel-Palestine, despite the risks and despite the complexity of the issues. … And so, if we are to honor King’s message and not merely the man, we must condemn Israel’s actions: unrelenting violations of international law, continued occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, home demolitions and land confiscations. We must cry out at the treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints, the routine searches of their homes and restrictions on their movements, and the severely limited access to decent housing, schools, food, hospitals and water that many of them face.

Occupation of Gaza? Huh? All Jewish residents of the Gaza strip were removed in 2005. They left behind state-of-the-art, productive farms; agricultural equipment including tractors, greenhouses, fertilizers, and tools; and lovely homes bought for the Arabs by two American Jewish philanthropists. The local Arabs trashed and destroyed every single remnant of Jewish life. And they escalated persistent rocket attacks against civilian towns in Israel.

6 Reasons to Oppose Nanny State Tyrant Kamala Harris in 2020 By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/election/6-reasons-to-oppose-nanny-state-tyrant-kamala-harris-in-2020/

A track record of using state power to silence the opposition.

On Monday, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) announced her candidacy for president in 2020. Harris wouldn’t just be the first black woman president, she would also use the full power of her office to silence conservatives — or anyone who disagrees with her and her powerful allies. She has a track record of weaponizing the law against her opponents and refusing to defend the people’s will in court.

Despite her claims to stand for “truth, justice, decency, equality, freedom, and democracy,” she has betrayed many of those values in these six concrete episodes.
1. David Daleiden.

In 2014, David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released a slew of undercover sting videos showing Planned Parenthood staff admitting to selling aborted baby body parts for profit, with one even joking about buying a Lamborghini with the profits. Planned Parenthood hired the firm Fusion GPS, now notorious for assembling the Trump-Russia dossier, to obscure the facts and suggest the videos were deceptively edited.

Kamala Harris, who has received at least $81,000 from Planned Parenthood, was serving as California’s attorney general at the time. In 2016, her office searched Daleiden’s home, seizing his video footage and preparing a legal case against him.

In 2017, Harris’s successor, Xavier Becerra (another politician bankrolled by Planned Parenthood), filed 15 felony charges against CMP and Daleiden.

Peter Breen, special counsel at the Thomas More Society, briefed PJ Media on the ongoing case last July. He argued that Daleiden’s filming was taken in “entirely public places.”

“I could point you to undercover investigations that are being shown on the evening news in Los Angeles. Under the standard they are applying to David, those would be felonies,” the lawyer argued. “The other reporters are being lauded for their brave investigative techniques, but David is being prosecuted.”

“I would say this is an abuse of the criminal process,” Breen told PJ Media.

Pro-choice law professors have defended Daleiden’s right to engage in undercover journalism. CONTINUE AT SITE

Spain: Catalonia’s Continuing Jihad Problem by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13579/spain-catalonia-jihadists

Police said that the jihadis were known to have committed at least 369 robberies and thefts in and around Barcelona. In addition to theft, the cell members sustained themselves through drug trafficking and document fraud.

“There is little doubt that the autonomous region of Catalonia has become a prime base of operations for terrorist activity. Spanish authorities tell us they fear the threat from these atomized immigrant communities prone to radicalism, but they have very little intelligence on or ability to penetrate these groups.” — American diplomatic cable, October 2, 2007.

“The Salafist religious centers detected in Catalonia are opposed to any reading of the Qur’an that is not the most rigorous… and at the same time are demanding a ‘purification’ of Muslim believers from foreign influences…. This religious interference results in the… prohibition, especially for female teenagers, of attending schools with male students. This supposes a deep break with the values ​​of individual freedom that are guaranteed by the laws of Europe.” — Intelligence report leaked to the Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia.

Police in the northeastern Spanish region of Catalonia arrested 18 members of a jihadi cell plotting an attack in Barcelona — and then released all but three.

The arrests have drawn renewed attention to the continuing problem of radical Islam in Catalonia, which has one of the largest per capita Muslim populations in Europe.

The cell — comprised of individuals from Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and Morocco — was broken up on January 15, when more than a hundred police officers raided five properties in Barcelona and the Catalan town of Igualada.

The arrests were part of a year-long counter-terrorism investigation called “Operation Alexandra,” launched in May 2017 after police received a tip that local jihadis were preparing an attack.

Catalan police, known as the Mossos d’Esquadra, said that the cell included five ringleaders who were in an “advanced process of radicalization with the aim to attack.” The cell adhered to the “doctrinal principles” of the Islamic State and were “significant consumers” of jihadi propaganda.

Sweden: New Government, Old Policies by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13594/sweden-new-government

Keeping the Sweden Democrats away from any kind of political influence seemingly became the main reason the government crisis lasted so long. Swedish political leaders are especially opposed to the policies of the Sweden Democrats concerning immigration.

“Sweden needs to build a migration policy from scratch, with fixed rules, and respect for the country’s borders, citizens and laws… Fire brigades and ambulances cannot move into immigrant-dominated areas without armed escort. Those who live and work in our suburbs get their stores robbed, broken or taken over by criminals. The few perpetrators who are actually sentenced for serious crimes escape with mild punishment, while their victims do not receive support or redress. As a result of the uncontrolled immigration, terrorists… walk freely on the streets and squares and utilize our welfare and asylum systems.” — Sweden Democrats.

There is not a word in the new agreement about terrorism and internal security, even though the Swedish Security Service (Säpo), in a January 15 press release, stated, “The level of the terror threat remains elevated, a three on a five-point scale. This means that a terrorist act is likely to occur”.

On January 18, more than four months after Sweden’s September elections, Social Democrat leader Stefan Löfven became prime minister for a second term, when he won the backing of the Swedish parliament: 115 parliamentarians from his own party and its coalition partner (the environmentalist Green Party) voted for his proposed government coalition, while 77 parliamentarians abstained and 153 voted against. There are 349 seats in the parliament.

Under Swedish parliamentary rules, a prospective prime minister can form a government even if he has not secured a majority of votes, as long as there is not a majority against him in parliament. Löfven was far from winning a majority of votes, prompting the question whether, despite becoming prime minister for a second term, he actually won the election.

The Women’s March Follows Farrakhan off a Cliff Its leaders’ anti-Semitism drives off the Democratic Party and the Southern Poverty Law Center.By Elliot Kaufman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-womens-march-follows-farrakhan-off-a-cliff-11548104190?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=0&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Saturday’s Women’s March was much smaller than the original, held in 2017. It was notable not only because far fewer showed up but for who stayed away. The Democratic Party disavowed its partnership with the march, as did the Southern Poverty Law Center, Emily’s List, the Human Rights Campaign, NARAL, the Center for American Progress and hundreds of other liberal interest groups. The march had 550 official partners in 2018 and less than half as many this year. One by one, the pink hats came off.

What happened? The group that yelled loudest about Mr. Trump’s bigotry was brought low by bigotry of its own. Tablet reported last month that at the first meeting to organize the Women’s March, four days after Mr. Trump’s election, two of the group’s leaders, Carmen Perez and Tamika Mallory, insisted that, in the reporters’ paraphrase, “Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people” and were leaders of the slave trade. Vanessa Wruble, a key organizer who is Jewish, told reporters Ms. Perez and Ms. Mallory later berated her: “You people hold all the wealth.” Ms. Wruble was pushed out of Women’s March Inc. by late January 2017.

So were other early organizers, leaving Ms. Perez, Ms. Mallory, Linda Sarsour and Mari Lynn Foulger, who calls herself Bob Bland, as co-chairmen. The four were the toast of the “resistance,” drawing effusions from prominent Democrats. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand called them “the suffragists of our time.” Nancy Pelosi praised them as “courageous.” The American Civil Liberties Union’s magazine lauded Ms. Sarsour as a “leader in the truest form of the word.” The ACLU is still a march sponsor, as are the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and the American Federation of Teachers—never mind that three of the four co-chairmen admire Louis Farrakhan. CONTINUE AT SITE

Pelosi’s Dreamer Pawns Democrats won’t talk even after Trump offers extended legal status.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosis-dreamer-pawns-11548103367

Democrats rejected Donald Trump’s compromise on immigration even before it was offered on Saturday, and that by itself should be instructive for the American public. Do Democrats want a deal to reopen the government and offer new security for more than a million immigrants, or do they want to use them as pawns against Mr. Trump?

On the evidence so far, the answer is the latter. Mr. Trump’s offer of extended legal status for young adults brought to the U.S. illegally as children, as well as to Central Americans and others with expiring visas, would provide relief against deportation for hundreds of thousands.

Isn’t this something Democrats want, or at least profess to? Democrats have sent a million press releases claiming to care about the Dreamers, Haitians, and those fleeing violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. It’s true Mr. Trump has held out this offer before only to renege. But here’s a new chance to get Mr. Trump’s signature on a legislative fix, at least for some years, without relying on the vagaries of courts and executive orders.

In return Mr. Trump wants money for border security and his wall, but political compromise means both sides get something. The wall may be a poisonous word for Democrats, but the President has already walked back his original demands. He is now talking about “steel barriers at high-priority locations,” not across all 2,000 miles. A fence of some kind already exists across 700 or so miles, the Administration is building another 115, and Mr. Trump wants to build another 230.

A Democratic presidential candidate (Tulsi Gabbard-Hawai District 2) says both sides to blame for shutdown impasse By Rick Moran

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/a_democratic_presidential_candidate_says_both_sides_to_blame_for_shutdown_impasse.html

Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is an unconventional Democrat. She deployed to Iraq with the Hawaii National Guard in 2005 and then promptly came out against American interventionism in the Middle East. She met with Syrian tyrant Bashar Assad. She joined Republicans in calling on President Obama to identify “radical Islam” as a major threat and refers to herself as a “hawk” on terrorism. She supported Bernie Sanders for president in 2016.

At one time, she was considered a “rising star” on the Democratic left. But while she is an economic progressive, her approach to foreign policy has angered the left.

She recently apologized for previous “anti-LGBTQ” statements, proving that on some issues, she is a very conventional Democrat. Now, having announced her intention to run for the Democratic nomination for president, she appears willing to stake out positions in opposition to her party.

Yesterday, she said that both sides are to blame for the shutdown logjam.

Politico:

“The problem here is that this issue, like so many others in Washington, are being relegated to partisan politics,” she said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“Where if a Republican is putting forward a proposal, Democrats are going to shoot it down. If Democrats are putting forward a proposal, Republicans are going to shoot it down, really thinking about which party can call a win on this issue.”