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The Nihilism of Antifa: Edward Cline

The average Antifa recruit is a sociopath. He’s in the “resistance” irrespective of the “cause.” He’s in the mob because of his basic nihilism; freedom of speech means nothing to him. He would “oppose,” while carrying a stick or wearing steel-toed shoes or knuckle busters, a speech about the chemical composition of cow paddies. It could be about immigration, Brexit, Trump, pro-Trumpers, or MiloYiannopoulos. It matters not. He is an empty vessel. There is the chance to chant with countless others to feel “one” with them is that is his driving motive to physically assault demonstrators and be paid for it. Alone he is a non-performer, a non-entity. Antifac gives him a chance to vent his malevolent universe soul, to lash out at anyone who stands for something.

The mentality of an Antifa “soldier” is parallel with that of an Islamic jihadist. The latter’s end is his own death, or arrest, or “martyrdom.” They have said that in so many instances. But maybe it is also, if he survives being shot, the five minutes of TV fame as his carnage is televised and he is shown being led away by the police. But it is not “mental illness,” which is what European authorities invariably ascribe to Muslim attacks on non-Muslims. It is plain, unadulterated nihilism. Islam is a nihilist, death-worshipping “creed.”

Antifa “soldiers” are impervious to the charge that their “anti-fascist” mantra allows them to behave like fascists, just as Hitler’s brown shirts behaved.

The Left Can’t Stop Campus Riots Like Middlebury’s Because Their Ideology Deserves Blame: Peter Wood *****

Liberals need to appreciate the dangers posed by a radical movement that rejects the principles of intellectual freedom and freedom of expression.

The Middlebury College protest on March 2 that silenced an invited speaker and hospitalized a popular professor has continued to garner attention.

More than 100 Middlebury professors—included the one injured in the encounter—have signed a statement of principles, Free Inquiry on Campus, upholding the classic virtues of “free, reasoned, and civil speech.” The document implicitly repudiates the actions of some other Middlebury professors who instigated the effort to deny Dr. Charles Murray the opportunity to speak on campus.
The American Political Science Association, representing 13,000 professors and students, issued its own statement condemning “Violence at Middlebury College.” The APSA statement says, in part, “The violence surrounding the talk undermined the ability of faculty and students to engage in the free exchange of ideas and debate, thereby impeding academic freedom on the Middlebury campus.”
How Liberals Are Responding To Middlebury’s Protest

Harry Boyte, founder of the Public Achievement movement, has written in The Huffington Post to condemn Middlebury students’ intolerant, violent actions. Boyte pointedly evoked his memories of the 1960s: “the student actions recalled the mob violence across the South which I often saw as a young man in the civil rights movement working for Martin Luther King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).” Boyte also underlined the essential point: “Free speech is a crucial value for education.”

The liberal commentator Frank Bruni devoted his Sunday New York Times column, “The Dangerous Safety of College,” to lamenting “the recent melee at Middlebury.” Bruni’s point is that “somewhere along the way,” the Middlebury protesters “got the idea that they should be able to purge their world of perspectives offensive to them.” Instead of using the occasion “to hone the most eloquent” arguments against Dr. Murray, “they swarmed and swore.” Indeed they did worse than that, but Bruni provides a nice round-up of comments from liberals who firmly reject the tactics of the Middlebury protesters, if not their message.

One notable figure Bruni failed to cite is Bill McKibben, the radical environmentalist who may well be Middlebury’s best-known professor. In the same vein as Bruni, McKibben took to the pages of The Guardian to chastise his fellow activists for choosing the wrong tactic to express their disdain for Dr. Murray. McKibben explains that by preventing Murray from speaking, they conferred on him a “new standing” and made him “a martyr to the cause of free speech.” It would have been better to have “taken all the available seats, and then got up and peacefully left.”

Many other Middlebury students, alumni, and faculty members have been writing and posting about the events as well, and because I published one of the longest and mostdetailed accounts of what happened, I received many private communications as well as pointers to other items of interest.

Interest in the story seems to be growing because it has implications well beyond the one small college in Vermont where the events took place. In that light, I think it useful to summarize the discussion so far, starting with the microcosm of Middlebury itself.
Yes, The Protest Really Became A Riot

President Trump, Please Plug Those Leaks Among other things, they discourage foreign leaders from speaking with the president. By Deroy Murdock

The word “leaks” does not begin to describe President Donald J. Trump’s problem. “Geysers” is more like it. He should apply a giant wrench to this deluge.

The latest apparent leak involved two pages of Trump’s 2005 tax return. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow hyperventilated Tuesday night over this “absolutely historically unprecedented” news. She looked absolutely historically foolish when these records confirmed that Trump earned some $150 million that year and paid $38.4 million in federal taxes. His 25.3 percent effective rate trumped the 22.5 percent average for his income level, the 18.7 percent that Obama paid in 2015, and the 13.5 percent that Senator Bernie Sanders (Socialist, Vt.) chipped in for 2014. So, Trump actually is rich and pays more of his “fair share” than do these two leftists who have denounced people like Trump as “the top 1 percent.”

While this presumed leak benefited Trump, it still reeks of stolen goods. If, in fact, an IRS staffer or another federal employee swiped Trump’s return, he perpetrated a felony under 26 U.S. Code § 7213. Punishment could include a $5,000 fine, five years in the slammer, or both.

President Trump should instruct the Justice Department to investigate how this document surfaced. Anyone at the IRS or elsewhere in the swamp who released it should be handcuffed, tried, and, if convicted, catapulted into a federal penitentiary.

Even more worrisome are the leaks that have scattered state secrets to the winds. Since Trump’s inauguration, the entire planet has read details about his phone calls with the leaders of Mexico and Australia, the communications of former National Security Council chief Mike Flynn with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, the CIA’s possible reopening of overseas interrogation sites, its eerily high-tech surveillance methods, and much more.

Trump haters in the bureaucracy may think they are harming him. In fact, they are wounding America.

Why would foreign leaders want to call Trump, knowing that their confidential words might get splashed across the world’s front pages within days? Why should Great Britain’s MI6, Israel’s Mossad, or Japan’s PSIA share intelligence with Washington? Why not skip the middleman and simply hold a press conference on such matters?

Never mind heads of state. Why should pro-American chauffeurs, secretaries, or soldiers abroad approach or cooperate with U.S. intelligence agents, given the risk that their identities might be exposed?

Chelsea Clinton to Write Book for “Tiny Feminists” Comparing Hillary to Harriet Tubman Daniel Greenfield

The Clintons are like cockroaches. If there were a nuclear war, after the fallout the only survivors would be Bill, Hillary and Chelsea who would climb out from under a pile of radioactive corpses to start working on their next book. And with the entire human race dead, they would have their pick of ghostwriters.

Since Hillary’s defeat, no amount of bribes, intimidation and glass ceiling rhetoric will give her a third act in politics. So the Clinton crime family has everything staked on a dim daughter who couldn’t manage to successfully interview an actual sock puppet on NBC. So they’re all writing children’s books. Because child abuse is the final Clinton frontier.

Chelsea Clinton has written a children’s book, with a sharply worded title.

The book is called “She Persisted” and comes out May 30, Penguin Young Readers announced Thursday. Clinton will honor 13 American women “who never take no for an answer,” including Harriet Tubman, Sonia Sotomayor and Oprah Winfrey. “She Persisted” will also feature a “special” and unidentified cameo, presumably Clinton’s mother, Hillary Clinton.

So the Clintons stole Warren’s publicity stunt, but won’t be including her in the book.

Grifters gotta grift.

Also who can even tell the difference between Harriet Tubman, Oprah and Hillary. They’re all in the same category.

Chelsea Clinton introduces tiny feminists, mini activists and little kids…

Tiny feminists. Because they’re never too young to be brainwashed. That’s the bottom of the left. Also they’re never too young to give the Clintons money.

An FBI-Investigated Islamist Takes Over the Vermont Democrats A Norquist Islamist reinvents himself as a Bernie leftist. Daniel Greenfield

Vermont Democrats have something else to celebrate besides the creation and failure of the first statewide socialized medicine system in America. Recovering from that glorious triumph, Vermont Democrats have elected their first Muslim state party chairman.

The lucky fellow is Faisal Gill who called his victory a rebuke of President Trump. “To have a Muslim and immigrant to be the state party chair sends a really strong message to Trump and his type of politics that this is not where the country is at.”

Gill’s election doesn’t send much of a message about where America is at. But it certainly sends a message about where the Democrats are at.

Back when Gill was playing a Republican, courtesy of Grover Norquist, left-wing media outlets like Salon were willing to report on his troubling Islamist ties. But Faisal Gil has been reborn as a supporter of Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison. The left has become a warm and moist safe space for Islamists. The Salon article which Gill blamed for many of his problems would be nearly inconceivable today. Could anyone really imagine a leftist publication today describing the Muslim Brotherhood as a terror nexus?

But did Faisal Gill really go from Norquist Republican to Sanders Democrat? Did he shift from believing in free enterprise to embracing Socialism? Or did Gill always hold to an overriding ideology in whose shadow the distinction between Capitalism and Socialism becomes pointless infidel quibbling?

When revelations first emerged that Faisal Gill had been under FBI surveillance, he blamed Islamophobia. When Snowden’s enemy espionage operation exposed national security documents which were published by left-wing terror apologist Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept, a site whose former writer is now charged with some of the terroristic bomb threats aimed at Jewish centers, Gill’s email appeared on a list of alleged terrorist suspects and supporters, including Al Qaeda leader Anwar Al-Awlaki.

Glenn Greenwald had claimed that the Al Qaeda leader’s only crimes were “speak[ing] effectively to the Muslim world about violence that the U.S. commits in [Yemen] and the responsibility of Muslims to stand up to this violence.” Examples of this could include Anwar Al-Awlaki quotes such as, “Jihad against America is binding upon myself, just as it is binding on every other able Muslim”, “Don’t consult with anybody in killing the Americans, fighting the devil doesn’t require consultation” and “We will implement the rule of Allah on earth by the tip of the sword.”

Trump Begins to Slash Government Leviathan It is time for the taxpayer to stop subsidizing left-wing causes masquerading as the public interest. By Liz Sheld

President Trump released a proposed budget on Thursday with increases in defense spending and large cuts to numerous domestic agencies and programs. According to CNN, the budget slashes:

… non-defense spending at the State Department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency and [includes] the wholesale elimination of other federal programs.

This is fantastic news.

Here are the department cuts proposed by Trump:

• Health and Human Services, the department responsible for implementing Obamacare and its proposed repeal, would face a $12.6 billion cut — a 16.2% decrease
• Environmental Protection Agency: $2.6 billion, or 31.4%
• State Department: $11 billion, or 28.7%
• Labor Department: $2.5 billion, or 20.7%
• Agriculture Department: $5 billion, or 20.7%
• U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: $1 billion, a 16.3% cut
• Cuts National Institutes of Health spending by $5.8 billion, a nearly 20% cut. Also overhauls NIH to focus on “highest priority” efforts and eliminates the Fogarty International Center.
• Other double-digit cuts include Commerce at 15.7%; Education at 13.5%; Housing and Urban Development at 13.2%; Transportation at 12.7%; and Interior at 11.7%.

Here are the proposed program cuts:

• Eliminates the USDA Water and Wastewater loan and grant program, a reduction of $498 million
• Cuts $250 million by zeroing out National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration grants and programs that support coastal and marine management, research and education
• Reduces or eliminates 20 programs within the Department of Education, including Striving Readers, Teacher Quality Partnership and Impact Aid support payments for federal property and international education programs
• Cuts FEMA state and local grant funding by $667 million, including the Pre-Disaster Mitigation Grant Program and Homeland Security Grant Program
• Eliminates funds for Section 4 Capacity Building for Community Development and Affordable Housing
• Ceases payments to the United Nations’ climate change programs for the Green Climate Fund and precursor funds
• Scales back funding for the World Bank and other international development banks by $650 million over three years
• Cuts federal subsidies to Amtrak and eliminates support for Amtrak’s long-distance services.

Of Course Trump Was Surveilled — Isn’t Everybody? By Roger L Simon

Maybe I missed something but I’ve been assuming for the last half-dozen years or so, probably a lot longer, that every word I spoke into a cellphone, every text and email I wrote, every letter I typed in my Internet-connected computers and, more recently, every utterance I made in front of the Amazon Alexa on my desk were being recorded somewhere. And if someone or some organization seriously wanted to find them, if they could wangle permission or even if not, they would be able to get all or most of it. My life, good and bad, is up there in the cloud somewhere, every last word and digit.

Isn’t that true of all of us?

Then why wouldn’t that be true of Donald Trump?

Was he somehow able to escape the sweeping purview of the NSA, CIA, FSB, MI5, MOSSAD, MSS (China), BND (Germany), DGSE (France), SISMI (Italy), VAJA (Iran), BUREAU 121 (North Korea), etc., etc, not to mention a world of non-state actors who took a programming course somewhere and, these days, the refrigerator or the dimmer switch in the guest room, the oh-so-modern Internet of Things.

Angela Merkel wasn’t. Russian Ambassador Kislyak, a nuclear scientist, apparently wasn’t. Nor were, as opéra bouffe, the executives of Sony Pictures whose emails were rifled by the North Koreans.

Let’s be honest, we’re all under surveillance all the time and must rely, from all evidence, not on the laws supposedly protecting us, but, like Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, on the “kindness of strangers” for our privacy. (Let’s hope our peccadilloes are too minor to attract anyone’s attention — at least for now.)

In the end, it’s not a question of were we surveilled, it’s a question of who reveals the contents of that surveillance to whom, and when and why.

That is why, you will excuse me, but I look on the bipartisan conclusions of the congressional intelligence committees — that Trump was not, in that hoary term, “wiretapped” — with a jaundiced eye. In the narrowest sense, maybe not. In the larger sense, of course.

What concerns me — what should concern all of us if we are interested in living a free, independent life — is who leaked the various surveillances that did or did not take place. Those people MUST be punished. (We’ll leave aside for the moment the extent these leaks were enabled by Obama through his last-minute decree that information could be shared among 17 intelligence agencies.) The leaks seem to come in two forms.

The first we could call the “Leak Direct” (or in Shakespearean terms the “Lie Direct”). A prime example is the intercepted phone call between Mike Flynn and Ambassador Kislyak that ultimately resulted in Flynn losing his position as national security adviser in record time. Flynn was a private American citizen at the time of the call and should, according to law, never have had his identity revealed. That didn’t stop the leaker who, it seems, was also not afraid of the serious felony conviction that could come from his or her actions. So far that was a good bet. CONTINUE AT SITE

Michael Savage violently assaulted outside restaurant in Marin County By Thomas Lifson

Angry, violent progressives, driven by nonstop Trump-hatred emanating from mainstream and leftist media, apparently feel impunity in acting out their fury. Apparently it is open season on conservatives, at least in progressive bastions such as the wealthy Marin County town of Tiburon.

In a story originally broken by Bay Area media blogger Rich Lieberman:

Syndicated radio talker (heard here on KSFO) Michael Savage was violently confronted and physically attacked by an unknown assailant last night (Tuesday) in a Marin County restaurant.

Savage was with his dog, “Teddy”, and finishing up dinner at Servino Restaurant in Tiburon, CA (north of San Francisco) when the unnamed assailant charged up to Savage and began yelling, “Hey Weiner”, making fun of Savage’s legal last name. The attacker then kicked the poodle out of the way so he could get to Michael and then grabbed Savage and threw him to the ground, according to an eyewitness who watched the attack along with several restaurant patrons.

Savage was not seriously hurt and his dog is OK but the incident left him bloodied and shaken.

The two major Bay Area newspapers, The San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury-News, both reported the incident as “Savage claims…” and labeled him with such terms as “firebrand” and “fierce,” indirectly offering a rationale for attacking him. The incident took place in public, and there were witnesses and quite possibly CCTV recordings. The facts will be clarified because Savage’s attorney, Daniel Horowitz, is on the case, and he is a fierce and skillful advocate for his clients. I would never wish to face him as opposing counsel in a legal matter, and I would be delighted to have him on my side.

What Message Can Be Gleaned from Contradictory Ideas? By Eileen F. Toplansky

Recently, I was sent this piece about Robert David Steele who was a former Marine Corps infantry officer and then a spy for the CIA. At his own site, he claims to be “the Chief Enabling Officer CeO [sic] of Earth Intelligence Network, devoted to teaching holistic analytics, true cost economics and open source everything engineering.” Thus, “his ideas would enable the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals — first within the USA and then globally [.]”

This is code for doing away with capitalism. After all, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism. She stated that “[t]his is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

Here is a sampling of the Declaration of the Sustainable Development mandate

We envisage a world of universal respect for human rights and human dignity, the rule of law, justice, equality and non-discrimination; of respect for race, ethnicity and cultural diversity; and of equal opportunity permitting the full realization of human potential and contributing to shared prosperity.

Isn’t this already the foundation of American ideas and ideals?

To do this, Steele “proposed to Donald Trump that he close all 1,000 US military bases overseas and stop subsidizing military arms purchases by dictators and Israel.”

And this is when my antennae start to stir.

Notice the connection between dictators and Israel — Israel is the only true democracy in the Middle East, but Steele deliberately chooses to single it out. This is what the United Nations does on a regular basis and should be the first clue to Steele’s anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic bent.

The Sustainable Agenda continues with the following:

We reaffirm the outcomes of all major UN conferences and summits which have laid a solid foundation for sustainable development and have helped to shape the new Agenda. These include the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development; the World Summit on Sustainable Development [etc.]

Climate change is always part of this scenario; thus, “[c]limate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time and its adverse impacts undermine the ability of all countries to achieve sustainable development.”

The Colossally Dishonest Swamp Attack On Dr. Sebastian Gorka’s First-Rate Scholarship By Barry Scott Zellen

I read with increasing alarm what appears to be a coordinated smear campaign by former members of the Obama administration and their ivory tower proxies, taking aim in the now-partisan press (including the New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR) to undermine the reputation of strategic theorist Dr. Sebastian Gorka. Gorka has risen to prominence over this very same period after his appointment to serve as deputy assistant to President Donald Trump.

Without a drop of evidence, these critics have unfairly ridiculed Gorka’s fine scholarship and academic background, ignoring his many contributions to the literature of warfare over many years. In so doing, these liberal policymakers and ivory-tower academics in international relations and strategic studies show they remain unfamiliar with – and consequently unappreciative of – the great work their counterparts at America’s military academies. In fact, they appear all too-quick to dismiss America’s military scholars whose dedication and service to America’s warfighters should instead be respected and appreciated.

This is very much the case in the recent assault upon the reputation of Dr. Gorka. Gorka’s work deserves to be read, not attacked without merit. The attacks we see seem to be the work of a small group of Obama partisans indifferent to the carnage caused on their own watch, based on their failed leadership and strategy. They are likely still in shock at now being exiled from the swamp, but their own records speak to their responsibility for the rise of ISIS, and the spread of jihadist violence across the Middle East, North Africa and into the heart of Europe. Now, they have launched a coordinated hit job against Gorka within weeks of his joining the administration.

Consider perhaps the most egregious example, by Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin in the Feb. 24 edition of the New York Times. Their hit-piece was shamefully mistitled, “The Islamophobic Huckster in the White House.” Simon, a former NSC-staffer now at Amherst College, and Benjamin, the State Department’s former counterterrorism coordinator now at Dartmouth, were both Obama administration officials and thus complicit in the orgy of violence unleashed by Obama’s counterterrorism policies.

Nearly as offensive was Daniel W. Drezner’s Washington Post hit-piece, “Survival Tips for Sebastian Gorka, PhD,” which came to press three days later, which stooped so low as to malign Dr. Gorka’s doctoral thesis, which I myself have found to be a fascinating, thoughtful, and original work. I know originality of thought, especially conservative thought, is seldom welcome within the liberal-biased academy, so one must fear for any students of Drezner who dare to think outside the box, or more aptly, outside the bubble. But don’t take my word for it, you can read Dr. Gorka’s fascinating dissertation here.