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December 2019

Antifa Home Invasions: ‘Can It Happen Here?’ The hazard of progressive propaganda. Mary Grabar

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/antifa-home-invasions-can-it-happen-here-mary-grabar/

Recently, in Germany, a gang of Antifa punks broke into the home of a 34-year-old female real estate agent and beat her up for the simple reason that she was a real estate agent, i.e., selling property. In her case it was luxury property. Antifa does not approve of private property, especially expensive private property. So they beat her up.

Here in the good ole’ USA, Mike Adams wrote a column titled “Three Essential Firearms for Civil Unrest,” the ‘civil unrest’ likely being a “mob of Antifa ‘anti-fascists’” coming into your neighborhood and crossing your property line, Molotov cocktails in hand.

This may seem farfetched, but I’ve seen things progress at an alarming rate since 2011, when I observed and wrote about the Occupy Wall Street movement from which our present-day Antifa movement has evolved.

I was living in the Atlanta area so I went to the “occupation” of Woodruff Park downtown. In my article I noted the “hippie art festival” atmosphere among the tents, but also wondered, as my title indicated, whether the “occupations” were “anarchy waiting for crisis.” Occupiers protested the sale of a building used as a homeless shelter to Emory University for a medical facility. Back then I saw George Soros-supported “Cop Watch” punks in orange t-shirts putting their video cameras in the faces of police simply trying to stop protestors from blocking a hospital emergency entrance or an ambulance going down a downtown street. Today we have masked protestors with weapons calling for the death of police and attacking reporters and attendees of public events, like campus speeches and political rallies.

Back then, in response to the lag in police response to a 300-strong, rush hour march up Peachtree Street, and then the mayor’s revocation of his order to end the “occupation” of the park, I asked, “Is it endangering public safety to allow an anarchic group of young people, the homeless (often with mental and substance abuse issues), and ne’er do wells to take to the streets on their own?”  Noting the chants against private property and sales of socialist newspapers, I detected “unfocused, but revolutionary” aims of protestors. The young man selling the Socialist Worker told me that he had learned about its publisher, the International Socialist Organization, from his professors at nearby Georgia State University.

Divesting Endowments From Fossil Fuels or Common Sense? Students debate the politicization of universities’ investments.

What Divestment Misses

Calls for university endowments to divest from fossil fuels are constant on American college campuses, but are they wise? Divestment is too blunt an instrument for complicated questions. The inconvenient truth is that affordable energy and petrochemicals are the foundation of countless everyday consumer items that improve the quality of life for people across the world. The oil and gas companies that student activists want to punish are the same ones that have powered social and economic progress.

Even more inconvenient, oil and gas companies are among the largest investors in renewable energy and technology. Companies such as Shell, Exxon Mobil and Chevron are all key sponsors of the MIT Energy Initiative. It’s not obvious that shaming these companies will help advance green energy. Nor will it secure “climate justice,” the social-justice-infused environmentalism that typically dominates campus divestment campaigns. Getting rid of oil and gas would disproportionately hurt the poor and working class.

Educational institutions should debate, discuss and forge solutions to complex problems. With the benefit of multiple perspectives from different disciplines, as well as the intellectual authority and prestige of academic professionalism, universities can make a difference through ideas and research, not partisan endowment politics.

— Shantanu Jakhete, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, mechanical engineering

The IG, Nunes and Schiff The Horowitz report reveals the Democrat’s many distortions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ig-nunes-and-schiff-11576022741?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Monday’s Justice Department Inspector General report on the FBI’s Trump -Russia probe is illuminating in many ways, not least the light it casts on the previous claims by politicians when they were telling the public about what they saw in classified documents. House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff in particular has been exposed for distortions and falsehoods.

Americans first learned about the FBI’s abuse of the FISA process in a February 2018 memo from then House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes. The memo disclosed that the FBI had obtained surveillance warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court against former Trump aide Carter Page ; that the dossier written by ex-British spook Christopher Steele and financed by the Clinton campaign had formed an “essential” part of that application; and that the FBI failed to tell the FISA court about Mr. Steele’s political and media ties.

Democrats’ latest impeachment line: Investigating corruption is ‘election interference’ By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://nypost.com/2019/12/09/democrats-latest-impeachment-line-investigating-corruption-is-election-interference/

Here is what you need to understand the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings on Monday: According to Democrats, any investigation of possible Democratic corruption, or of Democratic collusion with foreign officials to interfere in our elections, is itself impeachable interference in our elections.

Seriously.

Numerous problems mar the impeachment process — not least the rush to judgment. Democrats have been rushing congressional proceedings until they catch up with the judgment that the president must be impeached, a judgment House Democrats have already drawn. The haste rubs many Americans the wrong way.

Democrats have also had trouble identifying a crime. That’s why they appear to have settled on a vague “abuse of power” standard that would make every future president impeachable. Without being able to articulate egregious executive misbehavior, they are nevertheless racing ahead.

The public wonders: What’s the rush? After all, Democrats apparently didn’t think the “crisis” was so dire that their Thanksgiving holiday should be postponed. In 11 months, the American people will be able to boot President Trump from office if they believe he is unfit. So why should the political class be permitted to pre-empt voters?

Trump surging, Dems tanking in the battleground states that will determine the election By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/trump_surging_dems_tanking_in_the_battleground_states_that_will_determine_the_election.html

Can the Dems crawl out of their hole?  So far, they can’t even stop digging.

We can expect even more pointless, futile railing against the Electoral College by Democrats demanding a national popular vote now that their presidential prospects in the key swing states are so bad.  I am so old that I can remember the Democrats crowing over the Blue Wall of 18 states that consistently voted for the Democrat presidential candidate for five straight elections, starting in 1992.  Back then, they thought the Electoral College was genius.

But now that the Dems foolishly wrote off the white working class and as a result handed the GOP a crack at the industrial Midwest, they don’t like the consequences.  It looks as though Trump is locking down support while the Dems are digging their hole even deeper.  Firehouse Strategies assembles the polling data from Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin:

Sydney Williams Reviews “Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters are Breaking America. by Kimberley Strassel

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Kimberley Strassel is a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board and writes a weekly political column, “Potomac Watch.” This book, her second, should be read by all, especially by those who feel Mr. Trump’s behavior justifies any and all resistance: to the man, his Presidency and even to those who speak or write positively about him or his policies. Sadly, it won’t be. But, if it were, there would be a better understanding of the harm done to our democracy by “haters” and how politicized the federal bureaucracy has become. There would be a greater recognition that the real threats to the freedoms we take for granted come not from the flawed Mr. Trump but from those whose hatred knows no bounds.

Ms. Strassel defines the Resistance as “…the legions of Americans who were resolutely opposed to the election of Trump, and who remain angrily determined to remove him from office.” The full title of her book is Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters are Breaking America. She deliberately avoided using the word “critics,” as the “haters” do not believe in nuance. In their view, one cannot disapprove of the man yet approve of his policies. As Ms. Strassel wrote, haters view everything to do with Trump in “black-and-white morality. You either hate the man, or you are as bad as the man.” – Witness what is happening to Attorney General William Barr.  (From personal experience, I am sensitive to this issue. While I have been critical of Mr. Trump’s behavior, language and character, I support many of his policies – tax reform; deregulation; exposing sanctimonious, prejudiced bureaucrats; support for Israel; demanding that Europeans pay more for NATO; levying heavier sanctions on Russian oligarchs; taking the U.S. out of the toothless Paris Accord; appointing conservative judges who practice Constitutional restraint and advocate for justice, not social justice; confronting China on the stealing of our technology, etc. I believe the disruption he has brought to Washington has been good for the cleansing of the City’s soul. Nevertheless, for stating my opinions, I have been called an insensitive racist.)

Why Does This Impeachment Not Feel Like a Defeat for Trump? By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-does-this-impeachment-not-feel-like-a-defeat-for-trump/

On paper, the speaker of the House and chairmen of the relevant committees announcing they will impeach the president should feel like a historic moment and a rarely equaled disgrace for the presidency. This day should feel momentous, grim, and solemn. In this presidency, it feels like “Tuesday.”

On paper, the impeachment hearings did everything House Democrats wanted them to do. While some of the key testimony was second-hand, the witnesses painted an ugly picture of the administration and president, focused on farfetched tales of a lost server and obsessed with the Bidens and not seeming to give a fig about what the military aid meant to Ukraine. The major television networks covered the hearings live. The objections of House Republicans were largely ridiculed by the media. The GOP was unable to introduce witnesses to interrupt the Democrats’ narrative or divert attention to the Bidens or other topics.

And yet the polling is about where it was at the start of October. As of this writing, in the FiveThirtyEight aggregation, 47.1 percent support removing the president, and 44 percent don’t support removal. That’s not good for the White House, but that’s nowhere near where Democrats wanted it to be. There’s nothing resembling the bipartisan consensus that Democrats had previously called a prerequisite for moving forward with the removal of a president. In fact, impeachment could well be hurting Democrats’ chances in key swing states. A recent survey found removal is opposed by 50.8 percent of voters in Michigan, 52.2 percent of voters in Pennsylvania, and 57.9 percent of voters in Wisconsin. Whether or not you think the hearings were persuasive, the evidence suggests they didn’t persuade many people who didn’t already support impeachment.

Democrats’ Cannibalistic Ideology By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/democrats-cannibalistic-ideology/

By their own logic, they are racist, sexist, elitist … and convicted of counterrevolutionary crimes.

O nce liberalism and progressivism give way to Jacobinism — and they often do, as we have seen in revolutionary France, China, and Russia — no leftist is safe from the downward spiral to ideological cannibalism. Yesterday’s true believer is today’s counterrevolutionary and tomorrow’s enemy of the people.

We saw something like that during both the Trump impeachment frenzy and the current trajectory of the Democratic debates and looming primaries.

The fury over Trump’s election led to a graduated and escalating series of efforts to remove him by suing three states for supposedly fraudulent voting machines. Then articles of impeachment were introduced. Suits followed citing the Constitution’s emoluments clause. The Logan Act was raised, as was the 25th Amendment. At each juncture, the zeal to remove the president accelerated in direct proportion to the failure of the previous effort. A lack of success was always explained as a result of insufficient revolutionary zeal, not an absence of evidence.

The escalation culminated in the appointment of Robert Mueller and his “dream team” of partisan anti-Trump attorneys. After their failure to find actionable obstruction and any evidence of collusion, Mueller confirmed in congressional testimony that he was largely a tired administrative-state figurehead, a shill for the anti-Trump zealotry of progressive prosecutor Andrew Weissmann.

After the collapse of each of these agendas, all that was left was impeachment itself. The criminal was still Trump; but what was needed was a new and better “crime” — and far more passion and hate. And both were found with Ukraine, as first defined as quid pro quo, later replaced by “bribery,” and finally recalibrated as “abuse of power.”

The weekly Jacobin rhetoric made the prior progressive talk seem counterrevolutionary — until we finally reached the crux of the matter with admissions by various Democrats such as Representatives Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Al Green, and Nancy Pelosi that impeachment was likely the only means to stop Trump in 2020.

Anti-Semitism Grows in Brooklyn as Its Roots Remain Misunderstood By Zachary Evans

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/anti-semitism-brooklyn-grows-roots-remain-misunderstood/

City leaders and national commentators have blamed white nationalism for an uptick in hate crimes targeting the borough’s Jews. The truth is much different.

I n 2019, the Jewish communities in the Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Crown Heights neighborhoods of Brooklyn experienced a wave of anti-Semitic violence. Much of it was captured on cellphones or security cameras, and local news covered several individual incidents. “It’s happening at a rate that we are not used [to],” one Orthodox community leader in Williamsburg told National Review.

The crimes have ranged from the harassment of individual Jews on the street to more-coordinated assaults. In September, a group of teens smashed the windows of a synagogue in Williamsburg as congregants prayed on the night of Rosh Hashanah. The attacks eventually prompted an outcry among Jewish media outlets, including Commentary, Tablet, and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, especially after statistics from the NYPD confirmed that anti-Semitic hate crimes in the city had risen markedly since 2017.

Yet the trend has been covered only occasionally in the national media, and such coverage often misses the mark. Take MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough’s suggestion during the November 15 edition of his TV show, Morning Joe, that the attacks were related to the rising tide of white nationalism. “We’ve seen anti-Semitic crimes skyrocket,” Scarborough said. “If we could just see what’s happening in Brooklyn every week. . . . The anti-Semitism is fueled by the promotion of white nationalism, and the refusal to call it out.”

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has made a similar argument. “I want to be very, very clear: The violent threat, the threat that is ideological, is very much from the right,” de Blasio said at a June press conference. National politicians have echoed the theme. In a November 11 article in Jewish Currents, Senator Bernie Sanders asserted that anti-Semitic hate crimes in New York, just as in the rest of the United States, are “the result of a dangerous political ideology that targets Jews and anyone who does not fit a narrow vision of a whites-only America.”

Dems Resurrect Russia Collusion in Announcing Articles of Impeachment By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/trending/dems-resurrect-russia-collusion-in-announcing-articles-of-impeachment/

On Tuesday, House Democrats announced two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. They accused him of abuse of power and of “obstruction of Congress.” The poll-tested “bribery” charge was nowhere to be found. Yet they also resurrected the skeleton of the Russia collusion narrative, despite Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s finding of no collusion and an Inspector General report revealing the many errors in the FBI investigation. The announcement was a clear political attack on Trump, more calculated to undermine his chances in 2020 than to actually hold him accountable for any alleged crimes.

“The first article is for abuse of power,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) began. “It is an impeachable offense for the president to exercise the powers of his public office to obtain an improper personal benefit, while ignoring or injuring the national interest. That is exactly what President Trump did when he solicited and pressured Ukraine to interfere in our 2020 presidential election, thus damaging our national security, undermining the integrity of the next election, and violating his oath to the American people.”

This claim twists the facts of Trump’s engagement with Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has insisted, over and over again, that he felt “no pressure” on the July 25 call at the center of the impeachment inquiry. In that call, Trump asked him to investigate Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election and potential corruption regarding the notoriously corrupt energy company Burisma, which had given Joe Biden’s son Hunter a sweetheart job on the board — despite his lack of experience in the industry.