Of Course There Is Such a Thing as a ‘Perjury Trap’ And it’s a legitimate reason for President Trump to decline to be interviewed. Studies will someday be done on the deleterious effect Donald Trump has had on the brains of people who loathe him. It drives them to say things that are as palpably […]
Don’t miss the significance of the Sarah Jeong affair. In this story freedom of speech, double standards, and the question of whether someone should be fired are all secondary distractions from what should be most alarming about it. The most important thing to note is that Marxism is now in the mainstream.
Jeong is the poster child for modern leftism. In a genuine and unassuming way, she dislikes people based on race and gender. Of course it is racist on its face, but so what? For her, everything comes down to group identity and the didactic world of who has power and who does not. That she and the New York Times are comfortable enough to openly spout this view is telling.
Is it Marxist?
Is this Marxism in the original sense of the term? No, but it is a descendant of the original. Marxism denies that human beings are individuals first, and instead identifies them first as members of a particular class. Ultimately, it divides the world between two classes: the oppressor and the oppressed. Whereas Marx divided the world only between rich and poor—the proletariat and the bourgeoisie—contemporary Marxists also divide the world along the lines of race, gender, and sexual preference. Everything comes down to power and group identity.
Those who want to be precise might take issue with me lumping together these new Left-wing categories with the old Marxist ones. As I understand it, the early progressives, themselves influenced by German idealism, unintentionally laid the foundations for this totalitarian view in America. Others, notably Antonio Gramsci, made it cultural; others still in the Frankfurt School brought it to the university. Finally, John Rawls probably made it palatable for polite society. But what does it matter? The end result is the same, and Marx was the father of it all.
To be fair, most people today who hold and espouse Marxist views may not even see themselves as Marxists. Most don’t even know they are Marxists. Very well; we can call it whatever you want: cultural Marxism, neo-Marxism, new-Left, Leftism, progressivism or neo-progressivism, identity politics, democratic socialism, feminism. The list of names is long and parts of these approaches conflict with one another, but the core thought is the same. And all of it is subversive and destructive of American ideals.
Earlier this week, Candace Owens, a young black conservative, was shouted out of a restaurant by a white crowd screaming obscenities and racial epithets at her and her dining companion, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk (who is white). The police had to be called, and the mob shouted obnoxious slurs at the officers as well. Owens tweeted: “To be clear: ANTIFA, an all-white fascist organization, just grew violent and attacked an all-black and Hispanic police force.
“Because I, a BLACK woman, was eating breakfast.
“Is this the civil rights era all over again?”
It is. And many Democrats are on the wrong side.
It would be easy to dismiss that statement as hyperbole if this were not the latest in a distressingly long line of examples of the left abandoning principles in pursuit of the bogeymen they themselves have created.
Also within the past week, The New York Times announced that it had hired tech writer Sarah Jeong to join its editorial board. Jeong has a long history of nasty and racist tweets directed against white people. She claimed that she was merely responding to trolls who had lobbed racial insults at her. But Jeong also tweeted insults against men in general, as well as police, and this went on for more than a year. Video has now emerged of Jeong spewing her ignorance and hatred during a speech at Harvard Law School.
The Times stands behind Jeong. Some applaud this as long-overdue courage in the face of torch-and-pitchfork crowds. Perhaps. But Jeong’s conduct isn’t merely bigoted; it is also immature and unprofessional and, in the case of her University of Virginia rape-hoax tweets, completely counterfactual. The Columbia School of Journalism issued a scathing report slamming Rolling Stone’s article about the alleged gang rape at UVA, and Rolling Stone lost one defamation case (and settled a second) as a result of it. This is who The Times hires, at a time when the press complains about diminishing credibility?
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270986/antifa-real-fascists-matthew-vadum
Foul-mouthed Antifa demonstrators went on a rampage August 6 as they assaulted two high-profile conservative activists at a downtown Philadelphia restaurant for being conservatives and supporters of President Trump.
The attack came the day after Antifa smashed the windows at a U.S. Marine Corps recruiting office in Berkeley, Calif., during a leftist counter-protest of a “No to Marxism” rally. Twenty people were arrested. “Besides the damage to the Marine Corps post, Berkeley police also said ‘an extremist element among a large group’ damaged 21 city vehicles, setting one on fire, and slashed their tires,” Fox News reported.
The incident in Pennsylvania’s biggest city also came after the leftist mayor of Portland, Ore., Ted Wheeler (D), allowed anarchy to break out in his city, instead of cracking down on Antifa troublemaking. For 38 days Wheeler, who is also police commissioner, allowed hundreds of his Antifa allies to unlawfully occupy public property at an Occupy ICE protest site that eventually became a biohazard. “I do not want the @PortlandPolice to be engaged or sucked into a conflict, particularly from a federal agency that I believe is on the wrong track,” he tweeted. “If [ICE is] looking for a bailout from this mayor, they are looking in the wrong place.”
The attack in Philadelphia and other recent violent actions by Antifa are yet another reminder that the totalitarianism-loving domestic terrorists of Antifa, who call themselves anti-fascist activists, are the real fascists in today’s America because, among other things, they use violent tactics pioneered by the real-live fascist storm-troopers of Weimar Germany, the Sturmabteilung (SA). These Antifa goons opposed the Nazis but eagerly copied their tactics, using their fists to shut down political opponents and break up meetings and rallies. Some Antifa today even dress like Nazis, wearing black and red, the anarchist colors which traditionally have also been used by Nazis.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-tax-wisdom-1533850010
Imagine how high the U.S. economy can soar if President Trump resolves the arguments he started with America’s trading partners. Already the conventional wisdom on the tax law he signed in December is moving in his direction. Whereas prior to the law critics suggested it would provide a modest temporary boost, there’s now an emerging consensus that the law may pull so much investment into the United States that it could impoverish governments across the globe.
Nothing says establishment consensus like the International Monetary Fund. The Journal reports on the findings of a new IMF working paper forecasting the results of the suddenly more competitive United States:
Companies will be more likely to put profits and real investment in the U.S. than they were before the U.S. lowered its corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, according to the paper. That will leave fewer corporate profits for other countries to tax.
This obviously suggests that foreign governments will be collecting less revenue from U.S. firms. Is Mr. Trump really going to drain swamps all around the planet? While that may be rather an appealing thought, the good news is that even voracious governments will be more likely to see the benefits of maintaining a competitive tax system. This will allow them to keep businesses in their jurisdictions, still generating government revenue.
The Journal notes that “other countries are likely to chase the U.S. by lowering their corporate tax rates, too, creating the potential for what critics have called a race to the bottom.”
For a long time the U.S. refused to join this race. The IMF paper notes that prior to the new law, the U.S. corporate income tax rate was the highest in the OECD “with no significant change over 30 years.” The IMF economists add: “Compounded by investor-level taxation of dividends and capital gains, high tax rates discouraged equity investment in the corporate sector while creating a marginal subsidy for debt finance.”
Now we’re competing in a race that can have many winners. Just ask Ireland and the countries of Scandinavia, which enjoy low tax rates on corporate income. And there can be many more winners as pro-growth policies catch on. The Journal notes, “When one country cuts tax rates, usually other countries follow,” said Alexander Klemm, deputy division chief of the IMF’s tax policy division and one of the paper’s authors.”
America is no longer a follower. Separately the Journal reports that economists are now raising their expectations for the U.S.:
CONTINUE AT SITE
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/trump-pushes-prison-reform-with-state-leaders-who-have-found-success
President Trump will spend Thursday afternoon huddling with administration officials and state leaders to discuss a path forward for prison form in Congress, something his administration has privately pushed for in recent weeks.
The 4 p.m. roundtable at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey will include four Republican governors, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards of Lousiana, and Attorneys General Pam Bondi and Ken Paxton of Florida and Texas, respectively.
White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley noted in a statement Thursday that each of the participants hail “from states that have already implemented” reforms similar to those contained in the First Step Act, a bill that passed the House in May and could be the foundation for a bipartisan deal in the Senate.
The president and his team have been working behind the scenes in recent weeks to modify the legislation to include changes to current sentencing laws and measures that would target recidivism rates among previously incarcerated individuals.
According to the Washington Post, the White House is in close contact with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah on the issue.
But efforts to amend the prison system and reduce sentences for crimes like nonviolent drug offenses could be met with resistance among conservative lawmakers who typically support the president. Some have even suggested that Attorney General Jeff Sessions could complicate matters given his longstanding hard-line views on criminal justice.
“With all that I have done to help Sessions, to keep the president from firing him, I think [he] ought to stay out of it,” grassley told the Post on Thursday.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/millennials_socialism_and_equality.html
Zach Carter of the Huffington Post is telling Baby-Boomers that they are getting their knickers all in a twist and really should tone down their worries since, after all, “socialism is good now.”
Carter, senior political economy reporter at the HuffPo, evinces dazzling ignorance and misdirection as he leads Millennials down a path that will prove disastrous to them.
Carter asserts that we are re-entering the “Golden Age of American Paranoia” and any genuine concerns about the spread of communism are delusional. Has Carter ever perused The Black Book of Communism (1999), edited by Mark Kramer? He would learn “the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres.”
Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of communism over seventy years.
‘Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit,’ Ignazio Silone wrote, and this is the standard the authors apply to the Communist experience – in the China of ‘the Great Helmsman,’ Kim Il Sung’s Korea, Vietnam under ‘Uncle Ho’ and Cuba under Castro, Ethiopia under Mengistu, Angola under Neto, and Afghanistan under Najibullah. The authors, all distinguished scholars based in Europe, document Communist crimes against humanity, but also crimes against national and universal culture, from Stalin’s destruction of hundreds of churches in Moscow to Ceausescu’s leveling of the historic heart of Bucharest to the wide scale devastation visited on Chinese culture by Mao’s Red Guards.
As the death toll mounts – as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia … the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the … ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression.
But, you retort, Carter never mentions the word “communism” in his article. It is exquisitely important to remember that according to Vladimir Lenin, “the goal of socialism is communism.”
In fact, Adrian Krieg writes that “the worst despotic governments of this century were: Nazis in Germany, Fascists in Italy, Communists in the USSR, [Romania, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia, (and) Vietnam[.]” Each was supposed to be a “paragon of socialist endeavor.” The end result was that the leaders of “these countries murdered more of their own civilian citizens than they lost in military conflict.” It is why socialism always results in tyrannical rule.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/amazon-sells-make-israel-palestine-again-t-shirt-despite-removing-hate-products/
Late last month, Amazon stopped selling Neo-Nazi and KKK products after Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) sent a letter urging the site to remove all products from Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)-designated “hate groups.” On Wednesday, the company stopped endorsing products from Infowars’ Alex Jones. Even so, the site is still selling “Make Israel Palestine Again” t-shirts, without revealing where the t-shirts come from — suggesting they come direct from Amazon.
Is Amazon endorsing the destruction of the State of Israel? If a user chooses a specific size, the site will reveal that this product is “In Stock” and that it “Ships from and [is] sold by Amazon.com.” This contrasts with a great deal of merchandise Amazon sells that comes from third-party sources.
Amazon does not reveal who produces these shirts, as it does with most products on “Amazon Fashion.” It seems reasonable for a user to believe that the company itself is designing and selling this product.
The slogan “Make Israel Palestine Again” appears across social media, and as separate accounts on Twitter and on Instagram. The Twitter account shows a picture of President Donald Trump wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, with the text altered to read “Make Israel Palestine Again.”
Anti-Israel activists with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement have adopted the slogan.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Amazon reviews are highly publicized and polarized. Three users rated the “Make Israel Palestine Again” t-shirt with five stars. “Get tons of compliments everywhere I wear this shirt!” RK reported. “One day the Palestinians will have their home again,” YoYo chimed in. A user named “ethan allen” added, “I love this shirt.”
Others gave the shirt one-star reviews. “Joanofark06” denounced the shirt as “ISRAEL HATE,” declaring, “This is a HORRIBLE, EVIL shirt, and I will not stand for this. I will refuse to buy from Amazon, ever again, until this shirt gets taken down, as Israel is God’s land, an our bible mentions Israel over 100 times.” The user went on to paint with a broad brush, declaring that “Muslims hate the Jews, just like satan does.” While not all Muslims “hate the Jews,” anti-Semitism is rampant in the Muslim Middle East, and opposition to the state of Israel’s very existence seems the last acceptable form of anti-Semitism. CONTINUE AT SITE
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270964/new-anne-frank-play-casts-ice-nazis-matthew-vadum
A new leftist politics-tainted theatrical production of The Diary of Anne Frank in Los Angeles outrageously compares the Trump administration to the German Nazi regime by replacing Nazis hunting for Jews with ICE agents tracking down Latino illegal aliens.
Although the play is set to open Sept. 6 in Los Angeles, the comparison between Anne Frank and illegal aliens in the United States is beyond farfetched.
Illegal aliens enter the U.S. without permission. They are, legally speaking, the authors of their own misfortune. Nonetheless, efforts to apprehend them are not persecutory, and when they are caught, they are not persecuted. They are treated humanely at all times. They are given a hearing and due process. If they are found to be present unlawfully in the country, they are removed from it, not sent to forced labor camps of death camps.
Apart from trivializing the deaths of six million Jews and many others under Adolph Hitler’s Nazi regime, the play treats those who enforce our nation’s immigration laws as monstrous genocidal brutes and absurdly equates the idea of maintaining national borders with violent governmental persecution. It is a theatrical manifestation of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/chicago-violence-16098.html
An explosion of drive-by shootings erupted on Chicago’s South and West sides this weekend. At least 74 people were shot, and 12 killed, between 3 p.m. on Friday and 6 a.m. on Monday. In one seven-hour stretch, starting around midnight on Saturday, at least 40 people were shot, four fatally, as gunmen targeted a block party, the aftermath of a funeral, and a front porch, reports the Chicago Tribune. Over two and a half hours that morning, 25 people were shot in five multiple-injury shootings, including a 17-year-old who died after being shot in the face. An 11-year-old boy, a 13-year-old boy, and a 14-year-old girl were also hit over the course of the weekend’s bloodbath. Mt. Sinai’s emergency room shut down for several hours due to the overload of bodies; in May, the entire hospital went into lockdown following a virtual riot in its lobby among gangbangers, reported Tribune columnist John Kass.
Meantime, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan recently celebrated the issuance of a 232-page draft consent decree for the Chicago Police Department, possibly the longest police consent decree ever written. Among numerous other red-tape-generating provisions, it requires the CPD to revise its protocols regarding “transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming individuals,” to make sure that the CPD policies properly define these terms and that officers address intersex, transgender, and the gender non-conforming with the “names, pronouns and titles of respect appropriate to that individual’s gender.” Last Thursday, a so-called anti-violence march shut down Lake Shore Drive to demand that the CPD hire more black officers and that City Hall spend more on social programs in the black community. Few voices, in other words, are tackling the actual cause of Chicago’s violence: the breakdown of the black family structure and a demoralized police department.
