https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KElidy8Luk4&t=326s
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/combat-white-supremacist-gun-violence-and-protect-the-second-amendment/
These murderers are not white supremacists …they are lunatics….without any fixed ideology….rskWe have to set aside the longstanding reluctance to recognize the nexus between ideology and brutality.
As our editorial declares, white-supremacist ideology is an evil, and it is fueling mass-murder attacks. This blunt truth is reaffirmed by the shocking rampage in in El Paso, Texas, this weekend, which was followed within 24 hours by another mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio — both coming on the heels of a similar massacre last week at a garlic festival in Gilroy, Calif.
The toll in these three attacks is still in flux but stands as of this writing stands at 32 dead and 66 wounded. The New York Times reports, moreover, that our country has seen at least 32 mass shootings this year, defined as three or more killings in a single episode.
We don’t yet know the motive in the California attack. The Ohio shooter has been publicly identified by police, but as of this writing not much is known about him — except that his own sister was among the victims. To the contrary, strong evidence has already emerged that the El Paso assassin was a white racist.
Anti-gun leftists, for whom racism explains most of the nation’s ills, rail against politicians and commentators expressing sympathy and stating that their “thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.” I don’t question the sincerity of the progressive rage, but it is political posturing nonetheless: If the time for soothing words is over, satisfaction will come only from actions that the Left demands. For the most part, that means heavy-handed federal firearms restrictions — explicit confiscation if they can get away with it, de facto confiscation by regulation otherwise.
https://spectator.org/democrats-fiddle-while-iran-burns/
Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) forces seized the British oil tanker Stena Impero on July 19, an outrage that follows Iran’s June 13 attacks on two oil tankers and the June 20 downing of an American drone. Yet rather than focusing on an increasingly volatile Iran, congressional Democrats are more interested in political gamesmanship than national security when dealing with the defense budget.
Cornered by international sanctions, Iran is lashing out with escalating viciousness, as ongoing economic turmoil has truly made both people and government desperate. This has culminated in the regime’s mostrecent proclamation of capturing 17 “U.S. spies.” Likely untrue, this claim illustrates how Iran’s hunger for conflict threatens American national security.
Accordingly, President Donald Trump correctly announced July 22 that the United States is bracing for the “absolute worst” with Iran. He already came to the brink of an airstrike against Iran following Iran’s destruction of the American drone in international airspace. Concern over Iranian casualties caused him to abort the mission at the very last minute.
While Trump’s administration is wisely taking seriously the magnitude of Iran’s dangers, on July 12 House Democrats passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Department of Defense’s (DoD) annual budget, by strict party-line vote, with not one Republican among 220 congressional supporters. Unsurprisingly, the legislation is a transparently partisan piece of political theater.
http://politicalmavens.com/
The NYTimes chose the following headlines to characterize the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton “In Texas Gunman’s Manifesto, An Echo of Trump’s Language,” “Manifesto Posted by El Paso Gunman Echoes Trump’s Words,” “Mass Killers Emboldened by Rhetoric of President, Some Candidates Say.” (NYT 8/5/19)
The reporters at the LA Times probed more deeply, interviewing former schoolmates who knew the killers and came up with the unsurprising profiles of two male loners who were humiliated in high school and recognized as problematic early on. Patrick Crusius, a 21 year old man who graduated from high school in El Paso two years ago was described by a classmate as “irritable and had a short temper, often picked on because of how he spoke. Every time I looked up in class, it was someone new speaking negatively to the kid, “Patrick, that is dumb, stupid.” Connor Betts of Dayton was a 24 year old “described as a troubled man who harbored violent fantasies. His classmate had reported him to the teacher for “jokingly telling girls that he was going to kill them.” He was suspended from school in his sophomore year after being caught with a list of people he wanted to rape and kill” (LA Times 8/5/19)
In January of this year, the WSJ published an interview with Andrew Pollack, father of Meadow who was murdered by Nicholas Cruz along with 16 other people at the Parkland High School. Pollack has co-written a book entitled “Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies that Created the Parkland Shooter and Endangered America’s Students.” Not all the circumstances of the three mass shootings are alike but the profiles of the killers as recognizably disturbed young men go along with many other examples of young people we have identified yet repeatedly allowed to slip through the cracks. Though it would be virtually impossible to keep tabs on all male loners in high school, it should be possible to add the names of those who have threatened or carried out violence to the watch-list that would prevent them from legally buying guns and assault rifles. Clearly, reforms must be made to drastically inhibit the sale of weapons throughout our country but we also need drastic reform of how we discharge troubled students from high school without notification to local authorities of what they have already done or threatened to do. It’s tragically obvious that profiling is an essential tool for identifying at-risk people and taking the steps that are legally available to law enforcement. As for the greater dangers of our prevailing culture of violence on our streets, on the internet, in the media and in the majority of our mass entertainment – that is a topic far more taboo than simply blaming the president.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14665/green-new-deal-poverty
“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal… is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all… Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” — Saikat Chakrabarti, the outgoing chief of staff for freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)
Chakrabarti seems to have deduced two things. First, he saw a glass largely full and still filling but for some still empty, and concluded he must first shatter the glass. After that, he apparently failed to consider that the dystopian streets of San Francisco — homeless people living in tents and defecating on sidewalks near high-rent high-rises, and the middle class and affordable housing squeezed by heavy taxes and constrictive zoning — might be a result of local “progressive” politics. The problem is that if his “change-the-entire-economy-thing” would ever be imposed, America as a whole might resemble those dystopian streets. If Soviet Russia, Cuba or Venezuela come to mind, consider India before 2014, when its prime minister, Narendra Modi, was elected.
A free economy, in which countless healthy, growing businesses can spring up and actually hire countless people, and that way offer economic advancement for everyone? Not for Bose in the 1940s. And not, it seems, for today for many who have not looked at how socialism really works — or unfortunately does not work.
“A liberal is intolerant of other views. He wants to control your thoughts and actions.” — President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1967.
Johnson, the Texas Democrat who extended Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal with his own Great Society, was an old-school liberal, certainly on domestic policy. The political activist-agitators LBJ impugned then as “liberals” are today’s progressives—one might even call them reactionaries of the left.
Epitomizing them is Saikat Chakrabarti, the outgoing chief of staff for freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y). Chakrabarti recently starred in a Washington Post article. The spotlight left a key to the influential staffer’s undemocratic mentality in shadows.
Chakrabarti, 33, acknowledged “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal,” Ocasio-Cortez’s multi-trillion dollar zero-carbon emissions mirage, “is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all… Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14650/russia-turkey-iran-adversaries-nato
Germany’s outright rejection of Washington’s request [to support Washington’s proposal for a maritime protection force in the Arabian Gulf to protect shipping from attacks by Iran] is likely to inflame tensions further between Washington and Berlin. U.S. President Donald J. Trump is already at odds with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on a range of issues, from Germany’s obstinate refusal to meet its Nato funding commitments to its pursuit of closer energy ties with Russia through the construction of the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
Mr Trump is highly critical of the project. He argues that it will make Europe, and especially Germany, too dependent on Moscow for its energy needs, which could undermine the resolve of the Nato alliance to take a robust stand against Moscow in any future confrontation.
So, at a time when the Western alliance is already struggling with how to respond to Turkey’s deepening military ties with Russia, Germany’s refusal to fulfil its obligations to protect shipping in the Gulf will be interpreted by adversaries of the West such as Moscow and Tehran as yet further evidence of what would doubtless please them very much: deepening divisions within the Western alliance.
Germany’s point-blank refusal to support Washington’s proposal for a maritime protection force in the Arabian Gulf to protect shipping from attacks by Iran is yet another example of Berlin’s diplomatic and economic sabotage of the Western alliance.
Following the recent upsurge in Iranian aggression in the all-important Strait of Hormuz, the Gulf shipping artery through which flows one-fifth of the world’s energy needs, Washington has sought international backing for Operation Sentinel, its naval operation to protect shipping in the region.
This search follows a series of Iranian attacks, including the shooting down of a US Navy drone operating in international waters in the Strait of Hormuz, as well as a number of attacks against merchant shipping, such as last month’s seizure of the British-registered oil tanker Stena Impero.
The media responds to mass shootings in America with hyperbole, politicization and blame. The blame game is usually confined to the left. However, the dumbest opining on the issue comes from the editors of the National Review- hardly a bastion of the left.
Here is their Editorial:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/el-paso-shooting-white-supremacy-evil-ideology/
Crush This Evil
“We are contending with an evil ideology — white supremacy — that deserves to be treated by the authorities as has been the threat posed by militant Islam.”
Really? Insanity, not political ideology drives these murderers……and the comparison with faith driven and calculated jihad is gratuitous. rsk
https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/04/does-trump-deserve-blame-for-texas-mass
s night follows day, the two horribly tragic mass shootings have Democrats pointing fingers of blame at President Trump. Trying to pin the blame for a maniac’s murderous actions on any one person, other than the shooter, is political opportunism at its worst.
Beto O’Rourke jumped in on Sunday, declaring that Trump was responsible for the shooting in El Paso, Texas, which claimed 20 lives and injured 26 more. O’Rourke declared that Trump “is a racist, and he stokes racism in this country. And it does not just offend our sensibilities, it fundamentally changes the character of this country, and it leads to violence.”
O’Rourke went on to claim that “We’ve had a rise in hate crimes every single one of the last three years during an administration where you have a president who’s called Mexican rapists and criminals.”
O’Rourke is hardly the only one blaming Trump. Critics instantly seized on a manifesto allegedly penned by the suspected shooter, in which he complains about the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” to link the shooting to Trump.
Princeton professor Eddie Glaude said on “Meet the Press” that “Hispanic invasion” is “almost the exact same language of the president of the United States.”
But assuming that manifesto — posted on the Drudge Report — is credible, the person who wrote it also happens to share many policy positions with Democrats. He’s mad about the environment, he wants universal health care, he hates big corporations and job-killing automation.
https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/04/the-dream-team-loses-to-the-nobodies/
When figurehead Robert Mueller likely allowed Andrew Weissman to form his special counsel team to investigate so-called charges of Russian collusion involving Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Kremlin, Washington elites became bouncy. The high-profile legal “powerhouse” lineup immediately looked like a sure-thing—an elite slaughter of the yokels.
As they perused the résumés of the New York and Washington prosecutors, and the Wilmer-Hale veterans, reporters were ecstatic that the supposedly straight-shooting Republican Mueller had turned his investigation into what the media soon boasted was a progressive “dream team” of “all-stars,” a veritable “hunter-killer team” of get-Trump professionals. One would have thought mere names and credentials win indictments, regardless of the evidence.
The subtext was that Trump had all but met his Waterloo. Indictments for conspiracy, obstruction, and worse yet inevitably would follow, until Trump either resigned in disgrace or was impeached. The media counterparts of the dream-team on MSNBC and CNN would make short work of the rubes. On air law professors and legal analysts who knew “Bob” Mueller (the same ones who assured us that “Jim” Comey was a “straight-shooter”), after all, swore this would be true.
Almost all the all-stars were not just liberal but “correct” as well. Many were either Clinton donors; a few in the past had defended either Clinton aides or the Clinton foundation. Many also had been tagged as Department of Justice future superstars. Their tony degrees seemed designed to spell the doom of the buffoon Trump.
Wired immediately boasted of Mueller’s team, “From the list of hires, it’s clear, in fact, that Mueller is recruiting perhaps the most high-powered and experienced team of investigators ever assembled by the Justice Department.” If “high-powered” seemed the signature adjective, then “ever assembled” was supposed to sound downright scary.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/274522/2nd-mass-shooter-supported-elizabeth-warren-daniel-greenfield
“Connor Betts, the Dayton, Ohio mass shooter, was a self-described “leftist,” who wrote that he would happily vote for Democrat Elizabeth Warren, praised Satan, was upset about the 2016 presidential election results, and added, “I want socialism, and i’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding.”
The pattern here is that there is no pattern.
The media keeps popularizing mass shootings, encouraging likeminded losers to pick up guns and open fire. Their motives vary, from purely personal to ideological. But ideology for mass shooters tends to be a cover for the same sort of personal dysfunction.
The media jumped on the narrative of Patrick Crusius, the first mass shooter in El Paso, Texas, for being an anti-immigration environmentalist. (It was much more interested in the first part of that than the second part of it.)
It’s paying much less attention to Connor Betts. An Elizabeth Warren supporter.
Connor Betts, the Dayton, Ohio mass shooter, was a self-described “leftist,” who wrote that he would happily vote for Democrat Elizabeth Warren, praised Satan, was upset about the 2016 presidential election results, and added, “I want socialism, and i’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding.”
On Nov. 2, 2018, he wrote: “Vote blue for gods sake.”
On Feb. 14, 2018, he tweeted this at Sen. Rob Portman: “@robportman hey rob. How much did they pay you to look the other way? 17 kids are dead. If not now, when?” That was the date of the mass shooting at a school in Parkland, Florida.
