RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Former Cleveland Brown legend Jim Brown told the team, ” I’m an American. I don’t desecrate my flag and my national anthem”

Last week before a Cleveland Browns exhibition football game, twelve players took a knee in support of Colin Kaepernick and his protest of the national anthem.

The team issued a neutral statement:

“As an organization, we have a profound respect for our country’s national anthem, flag and the servicemen and servicewomen in the United States and abroad. We feel it’s important for our team to join in this great tradition and special moment of recognition. At the same time we also respect the great liberties afforded by our country including the freedom of personal expression.”

But the anthem protest didn’t sit well with someone who many believe is the greatest pro football player in history. Former Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown, who made his mark not only in Hollywood but on the front lines of the civil rights struggle, spoke about the anthem protest to The Post Game:

Colin has to make up his mind whether he’s truly an activist or whether he’s a football player. Football is commercial. You have owners. You have fans. And you want to honor that if you’re making that kind of money. … I’m going to give you the real deal: I’m an American. I don’t desecrate my flag and my national anthem. I’m not gonna do anything against the flag and the national anthem. I’m going to work within those situations. But this is my country, and I’ll work out the problems, but I’ll do it in an intelligent manner.

The result?

According to Cleveland.com’s Mary Kay Cabot, a large group of players stood arm in arm, but added that Browns legend Jim Brown spoke to the team prior to the anthem and that may have played a part in the players’ decision to stand together.

About five years ago, Rush Limbaugh predicted the end of the National Football League. Drawing on the rash of stories about professional football players prone to concussion, the radio talk giant saw clearly that the Left would use a serious and very real problem to try to bring down yet another time-honored American institution. The NFL’s method of handling the bad publicity was to pour money into studies and agree to a $1 billion class-action settlement for retired players and their families. No one believes the NFL should not address an important health issue and it appears, in the wake of that public relations counterpunch, most Americans have come to grips with the inherent risk of playing a violent game and the fact that no one is forced to play. Choice won out. https://amgreatness.com/2017/08/28/jim-browns-lesson-nfl/

But as Michael Walsh is always warning, the Left never stops, never sleeps, and never quits. There’s always another arrow in their quiver and if the concussions story missed the target, perhaps the Colin Kaepernick campaign to kneel in protest during the national anthem would be a surer bet.
The Kaepernick story even had the promise of being a bullseye in its potential to undermine both football and American patriotism in one clean shot. The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback started the trend of refusing to stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner” last year at the start of a preseason game, later explaining, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” Some other players in football and other professional sports followed suit. For the most part, however, the protest has generated more scorn than applause.

One reason for that is the strong suspicion that Kaepernick was just an opportunist looking to grab some headlines as his football skills were waning. Another is the scuttlebutt that Colin’s new squeeze is a radical activist who encouraged him to protest in an overt (and self-destructive) way. Whatever the reason, the move doesn’t seem to have worked in his favor. Now a free agent, Kaepernick remains unsigned. The stunt hasn’t exactly endeared other Leftists to the public, either.

Last week, before a preseason game, the Cleveland Browns decided they were going to try and “win” something (a concept otherwise lost on them for a long many years) by becoming the team with the largest number of anthem kneelers.

For a brief moment, the protest seemed to pay off. Weak-kneed coaches, wishy-washy owners, and moronic PR flacks made excuses for the antics of these wealthy man-children who thought they were accomplishing something important by insulting a large swathe of their fan base. Nobody in the NFL seemed capable of expressing anything other than fear—and why not? In the media world surrounding professional sports, political correctness is a powerful force. And on the other side, the specter of boycotts loomed large if these protests spread. Uttering the wrong word about them could cost the league millions of dollars in lost advertising, but the ongoing controversy could cost them in ticket sales. Playing it safe down the middle, if not the smart move (because, ultimately, impossible), was at least an understandable instinct. They were set to catch it on both ends.

And then came Jim Brown.

For Clevelanders and football fans alike, Jim Brown is more than just a legend in this city. He is a demigod. He was the Cleveland Browns during their glory days and before the Super Bowl became the sine qua non defining football greatness. He held the NFL rushing record of 12,312 yards until it was broken by the Chicago Bulls’ Walter Payton in 1984. Brown is still the Cleveland Browns all-time leading rusher.

Sadly, Brown left the team and the NFL suddenly, prior to the start of the 1966 season. He had bigger goals—the most important being a dedication to racial justice. His activism upset some, encouraged others, and inspired many. He wasn’t the easiest person to talk to or to reason with, but no matter what he said or what he did, the respect he earned was always warranted. His image has been a formidable presence in a city short on championships. He has been a symbol of pride for Cleveland even during the darkest days of burning rivers, blown saves in game seven, and last minute fumbles. It was fitting that Brown played a big role in Cleveland’s first championship parade in decades when the Cavaliers finally ended our city’s sports drought in 2016.

Jim Brown is not someone the Left can credibly challenge. His social justice bona fides set him apart. No liberal could successfully denigrate his position when it comes to standing for the national anthem. It was natural for reporters to make tracks to get his take on the Browns controversy, however, and it’s likely they were surprised at his reaction and some were certainly disappointed.

Several years ago, when I heard about Female Genital Mutilation, FGM, I thought I had been mistaken. The idea that such an atrocity taking place in modern times could not be reconciled with my naive thinking at the time. After reading Alice Walker’s book, Possessing the Secret of Joy, I realized this hideous act toward women was alive and well in the third world countries of Africa practiced among Muslims and some Christians alike. What I could not wrap my head around was the silence from the western world against this barbarism. In addition, as I learned more about the various layers of intrusiveness in FGM, I became even more disturbed by excuses made in the name of religion and culture.

A couple of decades ago, a friend in the mental health field told me a startling but unsubstantiated piece of information. In the 1980s, long before FGM came to light in the Western world, she heard from other colleagues that a few American physicians in a large metropolis performed FGM on the daughters of wealthy Middle Easterners willing to pay the price. Although she was adamant her sources were reliable, I had difficulty believing this. Now, I think, perhaps there was some truth to her story. We will never really know. What we recognize, however, is this hideous action, a crime against humanity, is being performed right beneath our noses in the Midwest and, possibly, other parts of the U.S. If it is not being activated on U.S. soil itself, American girls are being sent away for “vacation cutting.” These young girls are sent home to countries which turn a blind eye toward this primitive ritual. Even though Egypt is trying to curtail the practice, it is included among these countries having over 90 percent of women who undergo FGM.

According to Equality Now:

The federal law addressing FGM in the U.S.: 18 U.S. Code § 116 ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ makes it illegal to:

• Perform FGM in the U.S.

• Knowingly transport a girl out of the U.S. for the purpose of inflicting FGM.

This law began in 1996 regarding the performance of FGM in the U.S., but it was not until the last couple of years the transportation action that is taking your daughter for “vacation cutting” was criminalized.

As an added protection, under half of the states have laws criminalizing this practice. Recently, Maine’s state representatives, mainly Democrats, narrowly defeated a bill to join these other states. The Portland Press Herald reports:

The debate over the bill, L.D. 745, was not whether the practice happens worldwide but rather whether it is occurring in Maine, particularly inside the state’s growing communities of African immigrants.

“I do not believe that it is happening in the state of Maine. I truly do not believe that,” said Rep. Lois Galgay Reckitt, D-South Portland. “And I believe if it was happening, it would be prosecuted vigorously by the federal (laws) or by the abuse statutes in this state.”

But Rep. Heather Sirocki, R-Scarborough, said that since introducing the bill she has heard from numerous people i

Politically charged street brawls broke out in Berkeley, California, on Sunday, with police arresting 13 charming participants on charges including assault with a deadly weapon. One Twitter video showed masked activists kicking a man curled in fetal position on the ground; the beat-down stopped only when a journalist, Al Letson, shielded the man with his body. “I was scared they were going to kill him,” Mr. Letson said.

As Charlottesville drew attention to the worst elements of the far right, Sunday’s melee revealed an increasingly violent fringe of the radical left that has received far less media coverage, much less criticism. It’s called Antifa, pronounced “An-tee-fa,” which is short for “anti-fascist.”
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Antifa members sometimes claim their movement spans the globe and dates to the 1920s and ’30s, citing the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, where protesters shut down a march by the British Union of Fascists. But in the United States and Britain, Antifa grew in the 1980s primarily out of the punk rock scene. As Nazi and white supremacist skinheads became a bigger part of this largely un-policed subculture, far-leftists met violence with violence, calling it self-defense.

As it grew beyond punk, Antifa’s adherents organized through the now-defunct Anti-Racist Action network and now sometimes through the Torch Network, as well as other less visible groups. Many activists also aligned themselves with the broader anti-globalization movement. But Donald Trump’s election has become the catalyst launching Antifa into a broader political movement.

The Antifa members we’ve interviewed shun the Democratic Party label, saying their activism constitutes its own political orientation. They’re mostly anarchists and anarcho-communists, and they often refer to fellow protesters as “comrades.” Adherents typically despise the government and corporate America alike, seeing police as defenders of both and thus also legitimate targets.

The anti-fascist anarchist website CrimethInc.com recently summarized its philosophy: “In this state of affairs, there is no such thing as nonviolence—the closest we can hope to come is to negate the harm or threat posed by the proponents of top-down violence . . . so instead of asking whether an action is violent, we might do better to ask simply: does it counteract power disparities, or reinforce them?”

Freedom of speech in America is under assault by the Left like never before.

The constitutionally-suspect shutting down of Patriot Prayer’s tiny, properly permitted rally at a federal park in San Francisco Saturday is yet more proof of the political ascendancy of the evil ultra-violent “antifa” street thug movement. The Left now has the power to dictate what is and is not acceptable speech in California and many parts of the country.

Patriot Prayer is an innocuous Tea Party-ish group that only wanted to conduct a rally to affirm its members support for free speech. Instead the group has been smeared relentlessly — and now as it turns out, persecuted by state actors.

As Fox News reports:

Joey Gibson, who is Japanese American and leads Patriot Prayer, said his group disavows racism and hatred and wanted to promote dialogue with people who may not share its views. He cancelled a planned rally Saturday at a field under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge after he said his members received anonymous threats on social media and feared civic leaders and law enforcement would fail to protect them.

The official excuse for sabotaging conservative events is always “public safety,” even though left-wingers never have a problem getting their message out. Given the track record of authorities in California in dealing with conservative speakers, Gibson’s fear that his supporters would be vulnerable to attack by antifa were completely justified.

So while Gibson may have canceled his group’s event, it was the authorities in San Francisco who effectively shuttered it by making it difficult if not impossible for his would-be speakers to speak. Police in nearby Berkeley prevented David Horowitz and Ann Coulter from speaking there by moving their speaking venues far from the university campus and changing the time of their events to make it inconvenient for students to attend.

San Francisco officials denied the First Amendment rights of Patriot Prayer supporters for a second time on Saturday by shutting down Alamo Square park at which Gibson wanted to hold a presser after canceling the rally at Crissy Field. A fence was erected around the park and riot police kept people out.

More than a thousand left-wingers showed up at Alamo Square to demonstrate against the non-existent neo-Nazis. They waved signs and chanted, as leftists are wont to do, the rioters’ mantra, “Whose streets? Our streets!”

Gibson later addressed a few supporters, including blacks, a Latino, and a Samoan American, in suburban Pacifica. Several reportedly said they “support President Donald Trump and want to join with moderates to promote understanding and free speech.”

Gibson told Fox News that San Francisco’s pro-antifa mayor, Ed Lee (D), prevented the rally from happening. Lee had claimed previously that the rally would attract violent hate-speech practitioners and violence. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D) and a cohort of Democrat politicians lied repeatedly, claiming Patriot Prayer’s rally was a “white supremacist” event that should not be allowed to go forward.