Displaying posts published in

December 2019

The Religious Bigotry of NeverTrumpers Evangelicals do not have to explain why they support Donald Trump. They are not required to answer to people who hold them in contempt. Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/30/the-religious-bigotry-of-n

The mockumentary that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” featured many sidesplitting moments; host Chuck Todd and other Democratic activists disguised as journalists spent an hour solemnly discussing the “assault on the truth” inflicted by Donald Trump and his “cult-like” followers.

The very same propagandists responsible for spreading fake news and conspiracy theories about collusion between Team Trump and the Russians proceeded to scold the president, his advisors, and conservatives for allegedly spreading fake news and conspiracy theories. It was hilarious.

The executive editor of the Washington Post, the news organization that has published thousands of stories pushing the Russian collusion hoax, lamented: “[W]e live in an environment where people are able to spread crazy conspiracy theories and absolute falsehoods and lies.”

The executive editor of the New York Times, a news organization also responsible for publishing thousands of articles pushing the Russian collusion hoax, concurred. “I think our newsrooms have been sort of rebuilt to do this, is to very aggressively sort out fact from fiction and to very aggressively work to make sure that people trust us and understand that that’s our job,” Dean Baquet explained.

The program should take a place alongside “Spinal Tap” and “Best in Show” as one of the best parodies ever produced.

New York’s Thickening Cloud of Violent Crime A surge in horrific incidents is unsettling the city—but elected officials keep making it easier for criminals to operate. Seth Barron

https://www.city-journal.org/new-york-violent-crime-surge

As we approach 2020, disaster looms over public safety in New York. A surge in violent crimes has shocked the public, from the midnight slaughter of four street sleepers by a mentally ill homeless drug addict; to the late-afternoon murder of a Barnard student, apparently by three young teenagers; to a spate of anti-Semitic attacks, climaxing in the Harlem arrest of a man who chopped his way with a machete into the upstate home of a Monsey rabbi celebrating the penultimate night of Hanukkah. 

Grafton Thomas, perpetrator of the Monsey attack, fled to New York City and was almost immediately apprehended. His car’s license plate number had been reported and, after he crossed the George Washington Bridge, the NYPD’s automated “license-plate reader” system registered his presence. He was arrested within 15 minutes of entering the city.

But if New York’s city council has its way, surveillance tools like the LPR will be rendered less effective, if not useless. The Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology Act enjoys the support of Speaker Corey Johnson and the co-sponsorship of most of the city council, which held a long-awaited hearing on the bill only two weeks ago. In the name of “transparency,” the POST Act would require the NYPD to disclose and publish the details of how such technology works. A council report complains that “if a license plate of a passing car matches a ‘plate of interest,’ the system sends an alert. Advocates believe that these license plate readers raise privacy concerns because every license plate is scanned.” The NYPD has warned that the POST Act would create “a one-stop shopping guide” for criminals to evade scrutiny.

But judging by the state’s evolving criminal-justice landscape, empowering criminals seems like the goal.  New York State is preparing to roll out sweeping criminal-justice reforms that will prevent police and the courts from detaining people arrested and charged with serious offenses. The new rules on bail remove judicial discretion from a remarkably wide array of charges. No one charged with a misdemeanor, for example, can be held on bail, regardless of his criminal history, gang affiliation, or evident disposition for committing more crimes. Misdemeanors in New York include assault in the third degree, causing “physical injury to another person by means of a deadly weapon or a dangerous instrument,” and reckless endangerment in the first degree, when, “evincing a depraved indifference to human life,” someone “recklessly engages in conduct which creates a grave risk of death to another person.”

Turns Out, Trump’s ‘Evil’ ICE Raids Benefited American Workers John Merline

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/12/31/turns-out-trumps-evil-ice-raids-benefited-american-workers/

Remember when Democrats reflexively accused President Donald Trump of being a racist when he said illegal immigrants steal American jobs? Turns out, he was right, as evidenced by the aftermath of the massive summer raid that rounded up hundreds of illegals working at chicken processing plants in Mississippi.

In early August, some 600 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents surrounded seven plants operated by five companies in six different cities. They rounded up 680 “undocumented” immigrants, in what was described as the largest raid in a single state.

This is part of a larger effort by Trump to target companies that knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Last year, it raided a landscaping company near Toledo, Ohio, and a meatpacking plant in eastern Tennessee. A Government Accountability Office report issued in early December found that arrests, detentions, and removals were all up in Trump’s first two years in office compared with Obama’s last two.

Nevertheless, the reaction to the Mississippi raid from Democrats was swift and furious. Joe Biden said the raid was a sign that “Trump is morally unfit to lead this country.” Sen. Bernie Sanders called it “evil.” Beto O’Rourke – who dropped out of the race two months after the raid – said Trump’s “cruelty knows no bounds.” The media, naturally, lent Democrats a hand by playing up the disruption and crying children, while playing down the fact that those workers were in the country illegally.

In fact, the raid was the furthest thing from cruel or evil or immoral to American citizens living in the area – many of them blacks – who flocked to get the jobs those illegals had held.

This week, the New York Times, to its credit, went to Morton, Mississippi – where a third of the illegals rounded up in those raids had worked – to see what’s become of the town months after Trump’s “evil” act.

Celebrating a Great Non-Event of 2019 by Douglas Murray

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15350/zayn-malik-non-event

The hope of most of us in a country such as Britain is not that everybody leaves their faith, but simply that people have religious freedom and that this should include the freedom to leave a faith if you wish to do so with no repercussions against your person.

It is, in short, the essence of that Enlightenment which Europe gave the world three centuries ago. We hear plenty of news of assaults on that Enlightenment. But this story of a non-event suggests that aspects of that Enlightenment may be more solid — and attractive — than we are sometimes given to think.

This has been a year filled with bad news. It is a season that cries out for good news. So perhaps I could end the year with a reflection on something that for me has provided — in a difficult and contested era — a small source for optimism. It is really a story of something that didn’t happen. A story, as Sherlock Holmes would put it, of the dog that did not bark.

It is now more than a year since Zayn Malik revealed that he no longer considers himself a Muslim. Some readers will wonder who Malik is. He is not a religious scholar, or a leading clerical authority of any kind. For young people around the world, however, he is far more famous. Malik is a young British man, now in his twenties, of Muslim parentage who came to fame as a member of the British boyband ‘One Direction’. When the group met — in the talent show ‘X Factor’ in 2010 — the group was hailed, among other things, for its diversity. However, this was obviously not the primary reason why stadiums full of largely young women screamed themselves hoarse as the band’s members sang and danced on stage around the world.

Malik never especially pushed his faith, but there were occasional glimpses of it. As I mentioned here in 2014, during the Israel-Gaza conflict of that year, Malik sent a Tweet saying, ‘Free Palestine’ to his 13 million Twitter followers. Now of course one may be a non-Muslim and start pushing ‘Free Palestine’ messages around the web. Britain was only recently saved from having a Prime Minister who indulges in such pseudo-simplistic yet actively bigoted rhetoric. But it did seem to be pushing a religious viewpoint from someone who had — by then — considerable cultural reach.

Watson Video: JK Rowling is Canceled When the leftist monster eats its own.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/paul-joseph-watson-video-jk-rowling-cancelled-paul-joseph-watson/

In this new video, Paul Watson talks about how JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, is canceled for ‘transphobia’ by the very woke mob she worshipped — and helped create. Don’t miss it!

Attacks on Jews in NYC and Media Double Standards Why we need to change the way we talk about black anti-Semitism. Danusha V. Goska

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/attacks-jews-nyc-and-media-double-standards-danusha-v-goska/

December 26, 2019, the day after Christmas, those Americans who emerged from their holiday celebrations to check world headlines were in for a shock. Police reported several attacks on Jews in New York. Americans don’t think of their largest city, a world center of finance and the arts, a cosmopolitan capital where one can enjoy cuisine from any continent at any hour of the day or night, as a place where Jews are unsafe on the streets. New York is the city of Seinfeld, of Woody Allen and three-time mayor Michael Bloomberg. Former Mayor David Dinkins famously called New York a “gorgeous mosaic” of diverse peoples. But in fact, these Christmas-and-Hanukkah-week attacks were part of a trend. As bad as they were, worse was yet to come. On Saturday, December 28, Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg and his guests celebrated the closing nights of Hanukkah in Monsey, a suburb north of Manhattan. An intruder burst into the home and stabbed five people.

Recent attacks on Jews in New York City typically involve unprovoked punching, cursing, and hurling of objects ranging from soft drinks to large and potentially deadly stones. Victims range from children to the elderly, and include mothers accompanied by their babies. Attackers sometimes yell anti-Semitic comments.

Videos reveal that attackers are frequently black. In one startling video from November 4, 2018, a group of young African Americans congregate outside a Brooklyn synagogue, talk among themselves, hurl a pole through the synagogue window, and then run away. In another attack, a Jewish man is walking down the sidewalk when what appears to be a black youth runs up behind him and punches him hard in the head, nearly knocking him over. In a March, 2019 assault, an apparently healthy, young man kicks a toddler’s stroller being pushed by the child’s mother. Attacks are not always violent. In one videotaped confrontation, a black woman screamed verbal abuse at a Jewish man on the New York City subway.

Soros’ War Against the Jews The shame, hatred and megalomania driving the world’s wealthiest anti-Semite. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/soros-war-against-jews-daniel-greenfield/

When George Soros hit middle age, he began seeing a shrink.

The ruthless financier’s problem was that he was burdened with an “oversized” sense of shame over a “guilty secret”. That guilty shameful secret which sent Soros to a psychoanalyst was “Jewishness”.

Soros’ Jewish problem was generational. He grew up in, in his own words, a “Jewish, anti-Semitic home”

He had adopted his father Tivadar’s worldview, that God was a human invention. It was Tivadar who forged and sold documents to Jews trying to escape the Holocaust, charging “wealthy clients”, as he put it, “whatever the market would bear”. And it was Tidavar who found his teenage son a place with a Hungarian fascist official who was confiscating Jewish property.

In his biography, Tivadar later described the trip to confiscate Jewish property as a move by the “kind-hearted” Nazi collaborator to “cheer the unhappy lad up” where after a dose of watching the persecution of Jews, “he quickly regained his spirits”. Soros would later describe this, a period that most Jews remember as a time of utter horror, as “the most exciting time of my life” or an “adventure”.

Tivadar’s amorality thoroughly infected his son. In an infamous 60 Minutes interview, which the Soros network and his media allies have worked hard to spin, Soros coolly agreed that he had “helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.” Then denied any feelings of guilt. “It’s just like in the markets — that if I weren’t there — of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would,” he observed.

It echoed his response to allegations of hurting the British economy. “When you speculate in the financial markets, you are free of most of the moral concerns that confront an ordinary businessman.”

Texas’s Concealed-Carry Law Prevented Mass Murder By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/texass-concealed-carry-law-prevented-mass-murder/

Yes, good guys with guns can save lives. They just did in the West Freeway Church of Christ.

The same weekend that Orthodox Jews in Monsey, N.Y., were fighting off another knife-wielding anti-Semite thug with chairs and coffee tables — they were fortunate that the perpetrator hadn’t brought a firearm, like the killer who targeted a yeshiva in Jersey City only a few weeks earlier — Jack Wilson, a 71-year-old congregant and security volunteer at West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas, took mere seconds to stop a potential mass murderer.

Earlier in the year, to the dismay of the usual suspects, Texas governor Greg Abbott had signed a bill making it explicitly legal for Texans with concealed-carry licenses to bring their weapons into places of worship. These kinds of protections allowed Wilson to achieve something that no gun laws now being pursued nationally by Democrats has ever accomplished: He stopped a mass shooter. My guess is that Wilson, a former deputy sheriff, is the kind of guy who probably wouldn’t have broken the law and carried a firearm into church had it been illegal to do so. The killer, on the other hand, I’m wholly certain, would have been undeterred by any laws.

Yet allowing people who pass ongoing criminal-background checks and take state-mandated training courses to bring their guns to a church or a school is a move that generates tremendous hostility among gun-control advocates. We must “do something” about gun violence, but we’ve learned that, in the liberal vernacular, that’s nothing more than a euphemism for “do something to inhibit law-abiding citizens from owning guns.”

‘The Winter Army’ Review: The Mountain Men The gripping and unlikely story of the making of America’s elite Alpine fighting force

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-winter-army-review-the-mountain-men-11577463400?mod=opinion_major_pos11

Lots of tales are told around roaring fires in ski lodges, stories about the day’s conquest of high bumps and deep fears on the trails, about the defiance of ferocious storms and the wolf winds of winter, about adventures in the back bowls and amid the pines and birches—and, at times, tales of poles broken on the chairlift and comical acts of ineptitude on the bunny slopes.

But every now and then, someone will offer up tales of a different genre altogether—stories that do not fade when the après-ski drinks wear off. These are the ones about the men who went to war on skis and later helped to build the resorts that are by now legendary among amateurs and professionals alike: Colorado’s Arapahoe Basin, Washington State’s Crystal Mountain, New Mexico’s Sandia Peak, Vermont’s Sugarbush, Oregon’s Mount Bachelor, Utah’s Alta.

The Winter Army

By Maurice Isserman
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 318 pages, $28

Meet the men of the 10th Mountain Division. Their peacetime achievements are themselves remarkable: Five of them were on the United States ski team in the 1948 Olympics, and a sixth was their coach. All told, five dozen ski areas across North America bear their mark, from selecting the terrain to designing the trails to installing the ski tows, lifts and funiculars. Their postwar achievements—basically building an industry out of an avocation—were set in motion by their unusual training as the nation’s World War II ski troops. It was in such an undertaking that they harnessed their reverence and respect for the mountains and then set out to share their sense of wonder—and their remarkable skills on skis.

Their training and wartime exploits are at the center of “The Winter Army,” a captivating account of the 10th Mountain Division by the Hamilton College historian Maurice Isserman. It is good to have the stories of these men between hard covers, for their heroics occurred three-quarters of a century ago and are in danger of disappearing.

Surely California Has Done Away With Racism By Now Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-12-28-surely-california-has-done-a

Let’s face it: As much as we here in New York would like to think of ourselves as the true vanguard of woke progressivism, California has long since seized that honor from us. On everything from sanctuary and free health care for illegal immigrants, to requiring transgender bathrooms, to banning plastic straws, to having the highest personal income tax rates in the country, it is California that today claims the mantle of woke progressive leadership.

Surely, then, California has done away with racism by now.

If you think that, then you must have missed the big piece in the December 23 print edition of the New York Times, with the headline “Black, Homeless and Burdened by L.A.’s Legacy of Racism.” This multi-page spread tells the tale of one Timothy Wynn, a black Los Angeles resident, who somehow recently “landed on the streets” in his 50s. How could that have happened? We are given few specifics about Mr. Wynn’s life prior to homelessness. Yes, there are brief mentions (without any details) of “mental illness” and of a “criminal conviction for drug trafficking” as possibly being “part of the problem.” But overwhelmingly, according to this article, the main factor in Mr. Wynn’s downfall was racism.

To read this story, California has not just failed to do away with racism. Even as California loudly proclaims to the world its woke progressive virtue, it has, instead, turned into a hotbed — some might even say a “cesspit” — of racism.

So who was it who denied Mr. Wynn the fair treatment to which he was entitled? No names are named; and indeed, it appears that actual namable people don’t have much to do with this. What we’re talking about here is not personal discriminatory misconduct, but rather something referred to as “structural” or “institutional” racism that has brought about an explosion of homelessness, now seen as the “defining crisis” of Los Angeles today.