RUTHFULLY YOURS

Video has surfaced showing masked Antifa thugs in Berkeley, California, last weekend calling for the destruction of the United States.

“No Trump, no wall, no USA at all!” the large gathering of cowardly black bloc-style protesters chanted at a conservative “No to Marxism” rally.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Antifa, short for anti-fascists, are the de facto militant arm of today’s Democratic Party, just as the Ku Klux Klan functioned as the murderous terrorist wing of the party many years ago.

“This is a political militia that is doing the bidding, in effect, of Nancy Pelosi and Governor Jerry Brown and the mayor of Berkeley and all these supposedly mainstream Democratic politicians, and this is a militia hurting American citizens for saying what they think,” Tucker Carlson said on his Fox News Channel show Monday.

Democrat office-holders are loathe to condemn the Antifa terrorists because Antifa sympathizers are their political base. Antifa enthusiasts in the mainstream media and in social media treat Antifa like courageous Freedom Riders and liken them to the troops who stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day to liberate Europe from the real-life Nazi menace. There may be some radical, dangerous kooks in the Republican Party, but they are vastly outnumbered by the radical adrenaline-fueled crazies who run in Democrat circles.

Left-wingers like the stunningly obtuse media personality Touré romanticize Antifa. “If white supremacists are American terrorists then those willing to physically fight them are doing heroic work,” he tweeted.

But who’s to say which people are “white supremacists”? The Left smears everyone it doesn’t like as racists and neo-Nazis.

Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer is a leading apologist for Antifa violence. After the Antifa-initiated rioting that police allowed at the “No to Marxism” rally in Berkeley last weekend, he tweeted, “The narrative forming of today online is that it was super violent in Berkeley. There were some fights, but overall it wasn’t actually.”

Besides, the Antifa had good intentions, he implied. “There were thousands demonstrating against hate.”

Police said 13 suspects “were arrested on suspicion of various offenses, including assault with a deadly weapon, felony assault and violating the Berkeley Municipal Code.” Six people were reportedly injured.

This brings to mind the quotation attributed to Stalin: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”

And maybe one can’t, after all, expect much from the Democratic Party, which by way of a DNC resolution supporting Black Lives Matter, officially endorses black-on-white violence and the murder of police officers. Condemning vicious radical left-wing hooligans hurts their reelection chances as they risk being characterized as soft on “fascism.”

President Obama allowed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter to run wild in recent years. Obama even rewarded riot-inciters and those who support killing police by hosting them at the White House. Instead of protecting citizens and their property, some politicians even admit pro-rioting policies openly, as when then-Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D) acknowledged in April 2015 that authorities “gave those who wished to destroy space to do that.”

Many of those same Democrats who stridently insisted to every TV news camera they could find for days that President Trump had to condemn by name, political affiliation, and ideological affinity the groups involved in the misnamed “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, over and over again are strangely silent when it comes to their terrorist Antifa friends.

” Our age not only disdains its inheritance, but actively reviles it, and wishes to destroy it. It is a totalitarian impulse. Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit id est semper esse puerum: To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child. To despise what happened before you were born is to remain forever a juvenile delinquent in the thuggish gang of the present tense.”

I had thought the floodwaters of Texas had at least momentarily submerged the left’s war on history. But I see a Hillary Clinton staffer called Logan Anderson has been triggered by a white man with a Confederate flag on his boat rescuing black people in Houston.

At one time, this would have been a heartwarming story – like the Brits and the Krauts playing footie in no man’s land at Christmas 1914. Why, look! Houston’s oldest surviving Confederate general is recognizing our shared humanity by taking his boat to rescue the children of his former plantation slaves! But we live in a sterner age, and the appropriate response to an offer of rescue from a vessel flying the Stars & Bars is to riddle it below the waterline and dispatch its cap’n to Johnny Reb’s Locker.

Elsewhere, the cultural hurricane swirls on. In Memphis, Gone with the Wind is gone with the winds of change buffeting the American inheritance. WREG-TV reports:

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — “Gone With the Wind” will be gone from The Orpheum’s summer movie series, the theater’s board said Friday.

The Orpheum Theatre Group decided not to include the 1939 movie about a plantation in the Civil War-era South in its 2018 Summer Movie Series after feedback from patrons following the last screening Aug. 11.

“As an organization whose stated mission is to ‘entertain, educate and enlighten the communities it serves’, the Orpheum cannot show a film that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population,” the theater’s operators said in a statement.

As Scarlett O’Hara presciently observed, tomorrow is another day. Indeed, today is the only day – Pol Pot’s Year Zero as Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day. Upon taking office, Justin Trudeau justified each bit of twerpy modish folderol with the words “Because it’s 2015.” Why have a “gender-balanced cabinet”? Because it’s 2015! Around the toppled statuary of Durham and Baltimore and West Palm Beach, the mob is taking it to the next level: “Because it’s 2017”, and anything that came before must be destroyed.

Totalitarianism is a young man’s game. The callow revolutionaries like to crow that their enemies are all “old white men” who’ll be dead soon, after which youthful idealism will inherit the earth. And it’s true that the surviving German Nazis are all getting a bit long in the tooth. But they were young once, and bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. And to be young was very heaven: in the early Thirties the Nazis were the smooth-visaged lads gleefully torching books in the streets. They were the future, and these elderly monarchists and middle-aged democrats, queasy about the torching of the non-ideologically-compliant past, would all be dead soon enough. As the blond Aryan boy sings in Bob Fosse’s film of Cabaret:

Oh fatherland, fatherland, show us the sign
Your children have waited to see
The morning will come when the world is mine
Tomorrow Belongs to Me!

Ah, but who watches Cabaret in 2017, never mind Gone with the Wind? From The New York Post comes an arresting headline – “Millennials Don’t Really Care About Classic Movies”:

A new study finds that less than a quarter of millennials have watched a film from start to finish that was made back in the 1940s or 50s and only a third have seen one from the 1960s.

Thirty percent of young people also admit to never having watched a black and white film all the way through – as opposed to 85 percent of those over 50 – with 20 percent branding the films “boring.”

My distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle remarks:

This is literally the cause of all our problems.

She means it:

You can learn almost everything about life from movies… You will learn, for example, that you are not the first generation to have Problem X or “Solution” Y… Oh, hey, this black and white thing with the stupid title [Goodbye, My Fancy] actually has a “free speech on campus” subplot…

But you can only learn “almost everything about life” if you stumble across movies. Very few people seek out Goodbye, My Fancy (1951). For the ensuing third of a century, it was the sort of thing that would turn up on the Late Show when you weren’t quite ready to call it a night – or on a rainy afternoon when you were overly familiar with that day’s “Leave It to Beaver” rerun and weren’t in the mood for Merv Griffin. Now we live in an age where the haphazard rewards of “stumbling across” have been entirely eliminated: You programme your own tastes on your own device, and you can live within those constraints 24/7.

A president’s pardoning power is absolute, as every judge knows, and just as absolute is the certainty that every pardon will be met by a hail of hosannas and a howl of complaint and grievance from someone.

The liberals and others on the left are beside themselves over President Trump’s pardon of Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who came a cropper with a federal judge who held him in contempt for enforcing the law on the border when nobody else would.

Sen. John McCain, who would denounce this president if the president gave him a winning lottery ticket, denounced the pardon because “no one is above the law.” Others are treating the pardon as foreshadowing the end of the world.

A columnist at the Detroit Free Press, where locking up everybody might be an attractive solution to crime and mayhem in the sinister streets of Detroit, suggests with typical liberal/progressive/left-wing outrage that it’s time to give up on a country that would elect Donald Trump as its president.

“With one reckless stroke of his pen, [Mr.] Trump last week trashed all those notions of American exceptionalism, and raised serious questions about whether this republic might survive his presidency, or whether it even deserves to.” An editor at the Free Press should give the poor fellow an aspirin, and let him lie down until he feels better.

Mr. McCain could use a good lie-down, too, perhaps not with an aspirin but something stronger, and remind him that a pardon can’t be above the law, because it’s a part of the law. All presidents have used their constitutional power to pardon those whom they think deserve it (and sometimes when they don’t). Some presidents, like Bill Clinton, have profitably pardoned the undeserving.

The New York Times called in one of its usual suspects to express the usual contempt for the president and his sin of the day. Prof. Martin Redish of the Northwestern Law School, with a novel theory of the Constitution, thinks Mr. Trump could be successfully challenged on constitutional grounds because Sheriff Joe, as he was popularly called when he tried to resolve the hell on the border, was convicted of violating constitutional rights, “in defiance of a court order involving racial profiling.”

“Good luck with that theory, professor,” observes the New York Sun. “The thinking at Northwestern seems to be that one can be pardoned for kidnapping, murder or espionage — any federal crime — only so long as constitutional rights weren’t violated.” The professor obviously needs a refresher course in the law, and there are correspondence law schools where he could take a tutorial without having to miss teaching any of his own classes at Northwestern.

Most pardons are controversial, whether by presidents or governors, and every pardon, whether for a real crime, or contempt, which is only contempt of a judge. Not very nice, of course, but judges often have skin as thin as tissue paper, and the judge who sentenced Sheriff Joe, U.S. District G. Murray Snow is infamous among Arizona lawyers for his exceedingly thin skin, and his sometime preference for upholding personal whim, if not the law.

“President Trump must wake up and realize the damage that Generals Kelly and McMaster are inflicting on his policies and on those who have been loyal to his ideology. President Trump should know that Israeli history is littered with heroic generals on the battlefield who were weak appeasers in national security when they became prime ministers, such as Israeli chiefs of staff Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. He should realize that just because they are generals they are not necessarily the right advisors to implement Trump’s tough-minded agenda.”

As an Israeli who supports Trump and attended Trump’s inauguration to celebrate his win, I read with a heavy heart the reports leaking out of the White House that Sebastian Gorka did not resign but was forced out of his position as a security advisor to the President by General H.R. McMaster and General John Kelly.

Mr. Gorka is the seventh Trump loyalist McMaster has forced out in recent months from the President’s National Security Team. All have been attempting to carry out President Trump’s campaign promises to combat Iranian and radical Islamist terrorist threats, and to support Israel and the U.S.-Israel alliance.

Gorka was the third Trump loyalist forced out since General John F. Kelly, an old military colleague of McMaster, was appointed to be the chief of staff and reportedly encouraged McMaster to make any staffing changes he deems necessary.

If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it is a duck. Maybe it does not sound yet like a “purge” and an ideological coup, but it is starting to look like one, engineered by Generals McMaster and Kelly. It is designed to eliminate President Trump’s national security agenda of support to Israel, opposition to the Iran deal, and determination to name and combat radical Islamist terrorism.

On Friday, in a letter reported by the Federalist, Sebastian Gorka’s explained his “resignation” by expressing his unhappiness with the direction that the Trump administration’s foreign policy has taken as signaled by the President’s recent speech on Afghanistan. Gorka stated:

“Regrettably, outside of yourself (President Trump), the individuals who most embodied and represented the policies that will ‘Make America Great Again’ have been internally countered, systematically removed, or undermined in recent months. This was made patently obvious as I read the text of your speech on Afghanistan…. The fact that those who drafted and approved the speech removed any mention of Radical Islam or radical Islamic terrorism proves that a critical element of your presidential campaign has been lost.”

On Sunday, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Gorka offered harsh criticism of McMaster’s stance towards Islamists saying:

“McMaster sees the threat of Islam through an Obama administration lens, meaning that religion has nothing to do with the war we are in.… He believes and he told me in his office that these people are just criminals.”

A source close to the White House said that after Bannon was forced out, anti-Bannon factions began erecting bureaucratic roadblocks to undermine Gorka internally.

Yahoo News reported that Kelly revoked Gorka’s security clearance, making it difficult if not impossible for him to continue his job. Other news outlets reported that Kelly has been restricting access to Trump as McMaster’s detractors are trying to reach the president.

Amid the turbulence of the past few weeks, it has been President Trump who has kept his head while others have lost theirs.https://amgreatness.com/2017/08/29/trumps-coming-victory-identity-politics/

Trump may be the one man in America who can detoxify racial relations—I mean actually do it, not exploit them in the mode of Black Lives Matter or Al Sharpton.
Let us first be clear: No one on the political Left can possibly succeed in easing racial tensions. Their identity politics approach has played itself out beyond the limits of absurdity. That is what the reassignment of the Asian-American sports announcer, Robert Lee, really demonstrates. This farcical episode, made ESPN a mockery, even to some on the Left.

The battle lines in this ongoing fight for the political soul of America became obvious mid-day on January 20, 2017, when President Trump took his oath of office and Democratic Senate Leader Charles Schumer, poised to introduce Justice Clarence Thomas intoned a Monty Pythonesque litany, “Whatever our race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, whether we are immigrant or native-born, whether we live with disabilities or do not, in wealth or in poverty, we are all exceptional….” Schumer’s emphasizing these distinctions, many of which a civilized society should be seeking to make irrelevant or, at best, secondary, actually produces a more fractured society; one less likely to reconcile differences in order to produce a common good.

Trump’s Inaugural Address, by contrast, sought to unify the nation:
When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice….

It is time to remember that old wisdom our soldiers will never forget: that whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots, we all enjoy the same glorious freedoms, and we all salute the same great American Flag.

Trump’s approach to this issue is the only method that can redirect this country to a politics of the common good and thereby help to heal its often exaggerated racial and ethnic divisions. The Left disdains the old patriotic symbols, and too much of the right is cowardly or echoes the left. Some NeverTrumpers even adopted identity politics to oppose Trump, as the absurd candidacy of Evan McMullin exemplified, a nonentity selected for his Mormon faith to create Electoral College mischief.

Charlottesville, however, was the telling moment. With the aid of viciously anti-Trump left-wing media, a tiny cabal of neo-fascists attempted to hijack Trump’s campaign and inaugural message of American unity in the Robert E. Lee statue controversy. The absurdity of this attempt is nonetheless overshadowed by this partial success: A small claque of politically irrelevant losers, professing a foreign ideology at war with American principles, somehow persuaded the media to give it free publicity and prominence. Why might that be?

The leftist media and their imbibers thus grotesquely magnified the torchlit “blood and soil” chants of neo-fascist provocateurs. The media and those too unthinking to question it became useful idiots to these neo-nazis.

Using the slogan “Unite the Right,” the neo-fascists seized, as in a coup, the otherwise honorable cause of the retention of Confederate monuments, one that President Trump and a majority of Americans support. The media tried to legitimate this foreign ideology’s coup by accusing Trump of sympathizing with it and thus tainting him and his supporters with opinions that are entirely Un-American. And since the Left and their puppets in the press see all of political life as a competition for dominance between identity groups and they claim to identify with minorities, they cannot understand opposition to themselves as anything other than a manifestation of “white supremacy.”

Visit the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and between exhibits of dinosaur skeletons, Asian elephants and Alaskan moose you might notice a bust of Henry Fairfield Osborn and a plaque honoring Madison Grant. Osborn and Grant were two of the country’s leading conservationists in the early 1900s. They also were dedicated white supremacists.

Osborn, a former president of the museum, founded the Eugenics Education Society—now known as the Galton Institute—which sought the improvement of humanity through selective breeding. Grant, a co-founder of the Bronx Zoo, is known today for his influential 1916 best seller, “The Passing of the Great Race,” a pseudoscientific polemic arguing that nonwhite immigrants—which included Eastern and Southern Europeans by his definition—were tainting America’s superior Nordic stock. Osborn, who was a zoologist by training, wrote the introduction to Grant’s book, which Hitler called “my Bible.” The New Yorker magazine once described Grant as someone who “extended a passion for preserving bison and caribou into a mania for preserving the ‘Nordic race.’ ”

Given their options, why are liberals so focused on monuments to Civil War figures? Politically, it makes some tactical sense. The GOP has spent decades warding off claims of racism, and forcing Republican politicians to defend prominent displays of Confederate statuary keeps them on the defensive. On another level, however, liberals make a fetish of Civil War monuments because it feeds their hallowed slavery narrative, which posits that racial inequality today is mainly a legacy of the country’s slave past.

One problem with these assumptions about slavery’s effects on black outcomes today is that they are undermined by what blacks were able to accomplish in the first hundred years after their emancipation, when white racism was rampant and legal and blacks had bigger concerns than Robert E. Lee’s likeness in a public park. Today, slavery is still being blamed for everything from black broken families to high crime rates in black neighborhoods to racial gaps in education, employment and income. Yet outcomes in all of those areas improved markedly in the immediate aftermath of slavery and continued to improve for decades.

Between 1890 and 1940, for example, black marriage rates in the U.S. where higher than white marriage rates. In the 1940s and ’50s, black labor-participation rates exceeded those of whites; black incomes grew much faster than white incomes; and the black poverty rate fell by 40 percentage points. Between 1940 and 1970—that is, during Jim Crow and prior to the era of affirmative action—the number of blacks in middle-class professions quadrupled. In other words, racial gaps were narrowing. Steady progress was being made. Blacks today hear plenty about what they can’t achieve due to the legacy of slavery and not enough about what they did in fact achieve notwithstanding hundreds of years in bondage followed by decades of legal segregation.

In the post-’60s era, these positive trends would slow, stall, or in some cases even reverse course. The homicide rate for black men fell by 18% in the 1940s and by another 22% in the 1950s. But in the 1960s all of those gains would vanish as the homicide rate for black males rose by nearly 90%. Are today’s black violent-crime rates a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow or of something else? Unfortunately, that’s a question few people on the left will even entertain.

Just ask Amy Wax and Lawrence Alexander, law professors at the University of Pennsylvania and University of San Diego, respectively, who were taken to task for co-authoring an op-ed this month in the Philadelphia Inquirer that lamented the breakdown of “bourgeois” cultural values that prevailed in mid-20th-century America. “That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow,” they wrote. “Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. . . . Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.” CONTINUE AT SITE

The Left-Wing Trump Haters

About a third of the Democratic party (15–20 percent perhaps of the electorate?) loathes Trump, from reasons of the trivial to the fundamental.

The hard-leftist hatred is visceral; it is multidimensional; and it is unalterable.

Trump is rich, crass, showy, a white male, and 70. As the anti-Obama, he punches every progressive button in existence. A candidate like Trump was not supposed to exist any longer in the 21st-Century Age of Obama, much less should he have ruined the anticipated progressive Obama-Clinton 16-year regnum. Trump’s accent is outer-borough and seems to exemplify for Trump haters the gaucheness of the golden trump name stamped all over New York. The Europeans have utter contempt for Trump, and that embarrasses leftists especially.

Unlike some Republican politicians who wished to be admired by cultural progressives, Trump prefers baiting the Left and its media appendages, as if to remind them that he prefers to overturn the entire progressive project of the last eight years — if not on ideological grounds (Trump not so long ago voiced a number of centrist and liberal views), at least out of tit-for-tat animosity. Unlike a restrained presidential Bush or a sober Romney, the president answers in kind — and trumps — the boilerplate leftist charge of “fascist!” and “Nazi!” leveled against him.

The Trump haters dominate our media and the universities, the entertainment industries, Silicon Valley, the billionaire green classes, the foundations and the brigades of professional foot-soldier activists, identity-politics operatives, and the Bernie Sanders shock troops. They are frenzied because they think their 1,000 cuts have finally hit arteries — only to see Trump revive in Nietzschean fashion, emerging stronger for the wounds. To come so close to ending this nightmare only to realize they are at the alpha and not the omega of their efforts intensifies their hatred.

Ritually cutting off Trump’s head, blowing him up, stabbing him to death, hanging him, beating him to a pulp — these all are the rhetorical bookends of the Left’s efforts to subvert the Electoral College, the Russian-collusion mythologies, the impeachment and 25th Amendments psychodramas, and Trump’s hoped-for physical collapse under the stress of pure hatred. The calls for Trump’s assassination or maiming, if, mutatis mutandis, aimed at Obama would have earned long jail time for dozens; now assassination porn becomes an object of emulation.

Yet Trump hatred only solidifies the Trump base. It also reminds independents and wavering centrist Republicans that in a Manichean fight (and the Trump haters seem to envision the current landscape as just that), one inevitably chooses sides. If the choice is reduced to a crude rant at a public Trump rally or the rioters at Claremont, Berkeley, and Middlebury, a screaming Madonna, the “pigs in blanket” chanters of Black Lives Matter, and the masked marauders of Antifa, the Trump haters probably lose.

The Loyal Opposition, Sort Of

Mainstream Democrats in politics are bewildered as much as repelled by Trump. They find him scary because their party that professes contempt for wacky Trump supporters somehow finds conservatives in control of all the traditional levers of political power, from the local to the state to the national level. There is no more Blue Wall, and Democrats know why.

Trumpism is insidiously predatory and picks off Democratic working constituencies like wolves do wandering sheep from the herd — with nocturnal howls to fair trade, reenergized industrialization, energy production, immigration enforcement, realism aboard, and infrastructure investment.

Likewise, savvy Democrats fear Trump because they had long preached that “demography is destiny” only to learn that lots of minority bloc voting in solidly red or blue states was not as electorally potent as a riled working white class in key swing states. The knowledge that the outsider and supposed fool Trump grasped that truth while both his Republican primary rivals and Hillary Clinton did not proves especially irritating. Hillary is now reduced to daydreaming about what a tougher Hillary might have said to Trump during the debate, incoherently bragging she was not intimidated as she proves that in fact she was.

All my life, I have known this rule about people: Those who don’t fight the greatest evils will fight lesser evils or make-believe evils.

This happens to be the morally defining characteristic of the left. During the Cold War, many liberals and nearly all conservatives fought communism, but the left fought anti-communism. The left opposed American military buildups and regarded the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union as nothing more than two scorpions in a bottle fighting to the death. They loathed Presidents Nixon and Reagan, not Communist Party Secretary-General Brezhnev.

They regarded Reagan’s labeling of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” with contempt. Typical was the reaction of one of America’s best-known intellectuals, Henry Steele Commager, then a professor of history at the Amherst College. He said, “It was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I’ve read them all.”

With regard to fighting communism — which, aside from Nazism, has been the greatest evil in the modern world (it killed and enslaved far more people than Nazism) — the left was an obstacle, not an ally. The left in the West and elsewhere did far more to enable communist evil than to stop it.

The same holds true with regard to the greatest evil in the world at this time: totalitarian Islam, or Islamism. The left is doing precisely what it did during the war against communism: It’s fighting the anti-Islamists, not the Islamists. Just as it labeled anti-communists “cold warriors” and other derisive epithets, the left labels those fighting Islamism as “Islamophobes” and, of course, “racists.” In the moral order as perceived by the left, it is the anti-Islamists who are the enemy of the good.

In this battle, the left fights American conservatives — and Israel, the country in the front line against Islamism. In a nutshell, rather than fighting evil, the left fights those who fight evil.

Therefore, if you have moral clarity, you are not on the left. If you have moral clarity, you can be a liberal, a conservative, a centrist, an atheist, a believer, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a black, a white, a Latino, an Asian, a Native American, a gay, a straight or a bisexual. But you cannot be a leftist.

The problem, however, is that people want to feel morally good about themselves, and no one wants this more than the left. It has written the proverbial book on moral self-esteem. Therefore, it does not merely believe that it is morally superior to all others; it knows it is. Leftists know they are more compassionate, more enlightened, more intellectual and more intelligent than conservatives. And they know that they care more about the “downtrodden,” the “marginalized” and the “disenfranchised” than conservatives.

But to feel good about yourself, you have to fight against something bad. Since the left doesn’t fight real evil (that would take moral courage in addition to moral clarity), it has to fight lesser evils or made-up evils.

An ACORN offshoot and other left-wing pressure groups are suing California in federal court because the state hasn’t made it easy enough for Democrats to flood voter rolls with illegal aliens and foreign nationals who aren’t legally eligible to vote.

Throughout the years Mickey Mouse, Mary Poppins, and celebrities living and dead were registered to vote because now-defunct ACORN and its allied groups were allowed to pollute the voter rolls.

The ACORN successor group known as ACCE Institute, League of Women Voters of California, California Common Cause, and the National Council of La Raza want to compel the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to incorporate voter registration material into the forms needed to apply for or renew a driver’s license or state identification card, or submit a change of address. They claim the DMV is violating the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), popularly called “Motor-Voter,” by asking the more than a million California residents who renew by mail every year to fill out a separate voter registration form.

Other election fraud-promoting state policies already exist in the Golden State, which is a haven for illegal aliens and illegal voting.

In 2015, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed a law to register all eligible holders of driver’s licenses as voters unless they “opt out.” The Los Angeles Times reports that law “was on hold until state elections officials completed testing of a statewide voter database. That process ended last year, and the automated process for registering voters is expected to be used before next year’s elections.”

But that still doesn’t provide enough opportunities for non-citizens to vote in California to satisfy whiny so-called voting rights advocates in the already solidly Democrat state.

“Since we first alerted DMV to these problems, multiple local, state, and federal elections have passed, including the 2016 presidential election,” said ACCE Executive Director Christina Livingston. “Enough is enough. It’s time for California to make registration easier for every voter as the law requires and to get it done before another election passes us by.”

In court papers, ACCE Institute claims ACCE has 14,000 members, as well as offices in Los Angeles, Contra Costa, Oakland, San Francisco, Sacramento, and San Diego. The group claims in 2016 that ACCE ran five programs that registered almost 10,000 Californians to vote. ACCE Institute describes itself as “a non-profit community organization that helps California citizens organize and take action to promote change that benefits social, economic, and racial justice.”

Because the state supposedly hasn’t been following federal law, ACCE claims it “has been forced to and continues to expend resources to promote voter registration in California that ACCE would otherwise have used to further other organizational goals.”

What might those “other organizational goals” be? The California branch of ACORN was adept at dumping garbage in the lobbies of banks, surrounding the homes of corporate executives and frightening their families, and providing rent-a-mobs for wealthy benefactors such as banking tycoons Herb and Marion Sandler.

The plaintiff groups are being represented by the ACLU of Northern California, Demos, and the law firm of Morrison and Foerster. ACORN-affiliated Project Vote had also been providing legal representation but it recently closed its doors.

In a recent op-ed in Politico, law professor Elyn Saks argued for “expand[ing] the definition of competence” of seriously mentally ill people so more can refuse to consent to treatment. “Instead of designing new ways to force medication on patients,” she writes, “we need to put our efforts into finding new ways to help people want treatment so we don’t have to use force.” Those are not mutually exclusive choices. Both are needed. This proposal—to make it harder to designate incompetence—is dangerous both to society and to the mentally ill themselves.

Our laws to treat the seriously mentally ill have life-or-death consequences. Persons with untreated serious mental illness sometimes attack police, who often must use force to subdue them. The public has grown inured to headlines about such rampages. One problem is that individuals with serious mental illness usually cannot be committed against their will until after they become a “danger to self or others.” Laws should prevent dangerous behavior, not require it: think of seatbelts, or ignition-lock systems for habitual drunk drivers. Under our current system, even after the seriously ill have been deemed dangerous to themselves or others, they still cannot be medicated over their objections. Doctors have to make a second determination, often including a return to court, to determine if the patient has the competency to make his or her own decisions.

Saks wants to toughen the standard for making this second determination, thereby ensuring that a larger number of dangerous patients won’t be treated. According to the American Psychiatric Nurses Association, virtually all nurses working in acute psychiatric units have been assaulted during their careers. Faced with dangerous mentally ill patients whom they cannot treat, nurses arrange to discharge these patients, or call the police to take them away; either way, patients will usually wind up as prisoners. Saks’s proposal would turbocharge this hospital-to-jail pipeline.

Saks points to her own ten-year refusal to stay on medications, which only came to an end when her therapist threatened to stop treating her. But Saks is fortunate that she didn’t wind up in jail; 400,000 seriously mentally ill individuals who decided not to take their medications did find themselves incarcerated, often as a result of their untreated illness.

Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) is one solution. It allows judges to require treatment-refusers who have already accumulated multiple incarcerations or hospitalizations to stay in treatment for six months as a condition of living in the community. AOT lowers the odds of arrest by nearly two-thirds. And while the threat of being forced into treatment may have inhibited Saks’s recovery, research shows that it helps most others. At least 75 percent of those in AOT reported that it helped them gain control over their lives; 81 percent said that it helped them get and stay well, and 90 percent said that it made them more likely to keep appointments and take medications.

Elyn Saks’s opinion carries great weight. HHS secretary Tom Price appointed her a public member of the Interagency Serious Mental Illness Coordinating Committee (ISMICC), which is charged with advising government on how to improve services for the seriously ill. It meets for the first time on August 31 but is already off to a bad start. Not only are committee members reading her op-ed, they are also studying briefing materials prepared by Paolo del Vecchio, director of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)’s Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS). As I documented in Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill, CMHS has no medical doctors on board and is so engulfed in political correctness that it refuses to focus on the seriously mentally ill. The organization’s briefing materials start off with a discussion of mental “health”—not mental “illness”—and note that the most important metrics for assessing mental health are “successful performance of mental functions, resulting in productive activities, fulfilling relationships with other people, and the ability to adapt to change and to cope with adversity.” Those are reasonable goals for most of the population, but for the seriously mentally ill, the indicators that matter are rates of homelessness, arrest, incarceration, hospitalization, victimization, and suicide. That means focusing on the lack of hospital beds, increased rates of violence, problems with civil-commitment laws, the refusal of many mental health programs to treat the most seriously ill—and the lack of focus on all this at CMHS.