Rochester Proves ‘Black Lives’ Don’t Matter to BLM By Nicholas L. Waddy

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/08/rochester-proves-black-lives-dont-matter-to-blm/

Over the July 4 weekend, 13 people were shot in this city of just 200,000 people. But has BLM organized marches on the homes of notorious domestic abusers or drug dens? Of course not.

For almost a week, Black Lives Matter and like-minded activists have been marching in the streets of Rochester, New York, protesting the death of Daniel Prude at the hands of police. BLM zealots even harassed diners and overturned tables at two restaurants located next to the apartment building in which I live, creating a social media firestorm. Events in Rochester have even attracted the notice of none other than President Donald Trump.

We Rochesterians are not used to playing a starring role in the national news cycle. Well, now we are, like it or not.

The curious thing? Daniel Prude died months ago, and under circumstances that hardly suggest racial animus played a role in his demise. He was a mentally deranged man on drugs—someone the police had to restrain as best they could. And restrain him they did, based on well-established policies and procedures. Unfortunately, based on a variety of circumstances—some of them completely outside the control of the police officers who detained him—Prude later died. This makes Tuesday’s announcement by the police chief that he and his entire command staff would resign at once baffling and unfortunate. The move only reinforces the (false) perception that the police were culpable in Prude’s death.

The facts be damned, however—the media and the anti-police outrage industry can turn almost any questionable incident caught on camera into an instant scandal. In fact, as we see in this case, a police “killing” need not even be recent to excite “anti-racist” fervor. Nor must it be demonstrably racist, as events this summer have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt.

If Biden Wins, China Wins—and America Loses By Steven W. Mosher

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/08/if-biden-wins-china-wins-and-america-loses/

The new Cold War between the United States and China is a zero-sum game, which will only be resolved when one system decisively triumphs over the other.

The New York Times on Monday published a 3,100-word story headlined “Joe Biden’s China Journey.” The three reporters whose bylines appear on the article engage in a painfully obvious effort to explain away the former vice president’s long and cozy relationship with communist China. Now, at long last, they suggest, Biden is ready to get really tough on China. Tougher even than Trump.

Good luck to them selling that fractured fairy tale. 

Biden has appeased China and advanced its interests for as long as I’ve been paying attention to China policy, which is to say since shortly after the Democratic presidential nominee arrived in Washington, D.C., nearly a half-century ago and I arrived in Hong Kong with the Seventh Fleet. American workers have paid a heavy price for the combination of naïveté and greed that has driven Biden’s views about China over the decades. The naïveté came first, of course. The greed came later. 

In the 1990s, Biden pushed for and voted repeatedly to protect China’s “most-favored-nation” trade status, which ensured that cheap Chinese-made goods would flood America’s big-box stores. Even worse, he championed China’s entry into the World Trade Organization under terms that heavily favored the Communist giant. This blunder cost the United States 60,000 factories and 3.5 million jobs.

Questions the Media Should Ask Joe Biden By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/joe-biden-questions-media-should-ask-candidate/

Skip softballs about ‘Trump’s soul’ and ask, for starters, why Biden has changed his mind on every major bill he supported as a senator.

An Atlantic reporter asked Biden about anonymously sourced claims (published last week in The Atlantic) that Trump had made belittled remarks about veterans: “When you hear these remarks . . . what does it tell you about Trump’s soul and the life he leads?”

Follow-up: What would Biden “say to supporters of QAnon” and to Trump for “not rejecting that conspiracy?”

“We also know that Russia has been trying to sow doubt about the system. Are you concerned at all that this messaging may be working, that your supporters may give up on voting by mail because they’re concerned that it may be rigged?”

“You said today is the angriest you’ve been as a presidential candidate, but you said you’re trying to restrain yourself. Aren’t there a lot of people out there who are supporting you or inclined to not vote for the president, who would say, ‘Why isn’t Joe Biden, angrier about all of this?’”

“Do you know when you will have another COVID test? Do you have any planned, any future testing coming up?”

And so on.

MESA Defends Canceling Supporters of Israel at USC by Winfield Myers

https://www.meforum.org/61489/mesa-defends-canceling-israel-supporters
The Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the largest academic organization for the field, has a long and ignominious record of defending apologists for Palestinian terrorism and BDS advocates, even as it opposes efforts to stem the rising tide of anti-Semitism on U.S. college campuses. To use a currently fashionable word, it evinces systemic anti-Israel bias. Even in light of this intolerant record, however, its latest effort to whitewash anti-Semitism at the University of Southern California stands out for its cynicism and deceitfulness.

A recent letter from MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom purports to defend freedom of speech from Zionists’ efforts to censor criticism of Israel on campus. In fact, it endorses the “right” of anti-Semitic bullies to drive Jewish students who support Israel from campus leadership. Under the pretense of defending freedom of speech, it seeks to cancel Zionists for their beliefs. In the end, by omitting key facts and attributing demonstrably false motives to others, it succeeds only in embarrassing its authors and further degrading their organization.

Rose Ritch resigned as vice president of undergraduate student government at USC last month after enduring severe anti-Semitic harassment.

Signed by MESA president Dina Rizk Khoury of George Washington University and academic freedom committee chair Zachary Lockman of New York University, the letter attacks USC president Carol Folt’s Aug. 6 “Message to the USC Community.” The catalyst for Folt’s action was the Aug. 5 resignation of USC student government vice president Rose Ritch, a rising senior who was subjected to what she and Folt characterize as anti-Semitic smears on her character triggered by her pro-Zionist beliefs.

Folt’s opening sentences state this clearly: “As you may know, our Vice President of Undergraduate Student Government, Rose Ritch, resigned yesterday from her position in student government. In her heartbreaking resignation letter, Rose described the intense pressure and toxic conditions that led to her decision—specifically the anti-Semitic attacks on her character and the online harassment she endured because of her Jewish and Zionist identities.”

Ritch’s resignation letter details her experience: “Because I also openly identify as a Zionist, a supporter of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, I have been accused by a group of students of being unsuitable as a student leader. I have been told that my support for Israel has made me complicit in racism, and that, by association, I am racist.” Over the summer, “Students launched an aggressive social-media campaign to ‘impeach [my] Zionist a**.’ ” Resignation, she wrote, “is the only sustainable choice I can make to protect my physical safety on campus and my mental health.”

An op-ed Ritch wrote for Newsweek further elucidates: “Let’s be clear: This is anti-Semitism. … Nearly 96 percent of American Jews support Israel as the Jewish state, inherently connected to our religious history and communal peoplehood. An attack on my Zionist identity is an attack on my Jewish identity. The suggestion that my support for a Jewish homeland would make me unfit for office, or would justify my impeachment, plays into the oldest and most wretched stereotypes of Jews: accusations of dual loyalty and holding all Jews responsible for the actions of the Israeli government.”

USC president Carol Folt decried “a history of anti-Semitism at USC” in her August 6 message to students and faculty.

Readers of Khoury and Lockman’s letter will learn none of this. Blatantly distorting the record, they mention neither Ritch, nor the vicious anti-Semitism to which she was exposed that led Folt to insist that “it is critically important to state explicitly and unequivocally that anti-Semitism in all of its forms is a profound betrayal of our principles and has no place at the university.” These facts are central to the story. By omitting them, Khoury and Lockman demonstrate their contempt for the truth and their readers.

In a rhetorical sleight of hand, they first insist—against all evidence—that the situation at USC is “complex” and “difficult.”

“We are aware that your message was issued in response to and against the background of a series of complex developments” concerning “some members of the USC student government and their critics,” they write. It “is not our intent here to weigh in on the many serious and difficult issuesthese developments raise … .” No, their “concern is that, in the one public document you have issued to date on these complex matters, you have conflated anti-Zionism—criticism of Israeli actions and policies, and of Zionism as a political ideology—with anti-Semitism [emphasis added].”

Anti-Semites cited Ritch’s Zionism as justification for declaring her unfit for office.

Khoury and Lockman never identify these complex, difficult matters for an obvious reason—because there aren’t any. The motivation for Ritch’s resignation, as she explained repeatedly and passionately, is simple: Anti-Semites cited her Zionism as justification for declaring her unfit for office and launching vicious cyberattacks that made her fear for her physical safety. Knowing an accurate description of Ritch’s ordeal would expose their lies, Khoury and Lockman omitted it.

Having buried one inconvenient truth, Khoury and Lockman drag out one of MESA’s favorite canards: that Zionists necessarily conflate/equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism in a conspiracy to silence all criticism of the Jewish state. Lest their readers miss the point, they use the terms “conflate,” “conflated,” “conflation,” “equate” (twice) and “Israel” (three times). Through such trickery, they mendaciously claim that Folt “conflated anti-Zionism—criticism of Israeli actions and policies, and of Zionism as a political ideology—with anti-Semitism.” Her message’s “conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism”—not the relentless anti-Semitic attacks on Ritch they refuse to acknowledge—have “caused significant consternation and distress among USC student activists as well as faculty.” Hence, it is Folt’s letter that poses “the real threat to academic freedom and to the constitutionally protected right of free speech.”

These are boldfaced lies. Folt never mentions Israel at all, and uses “Zionism” only once when condemning “the online harassment [Ritch] endured because of her Jewish and Zionist identities.” In ascribing to USC’s president a desire to silence criticism of Israel, MESA reveals its implacable hostility to the Jewish state and its supporters, not a Zionist plot for campus domination. Declaring students like Rose Ritch unfit to serve in student government because of their support as Jews for Israel is why Folt wrote her letter to the USC community, a fact driven home by her use of “anti-Semitism” five times.

Kenneth Stern

In what they intend as a coup de grace, Khoury and Lockman conclude by citing an unimpeachable authority, American Jewish Committee veteran and Bard Center for the Study of Hate director Kenneth Stern, whose webpage describes him as the “lead drafter of the ‘working definition’ of anti-Semitism now adopted by the U.S. Department of State.” One can almost sense the satisfaction with which MESA’s leaders must have written, “even Kenneth Stern, the lead author of the State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism, has, in testimony before Congress and elsewhere, opposed legislation or policies that conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.”

Not quite. Inconveniently for MESA, Stern is co-author of “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been a Zionist?”—an impassioned apologia for none other than USC undergraduate Rose Ritch. Let that sink in. The student whose existence and travails MESA refuses to acknowledge enjoys the unqualified support of Khoury and Lockman’s ringer, who turns out to be playing for the other team.

Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

Stern co-authored the piece, which appeared two weeks after MESA’s letter to Folt, with former AAUP president Cary Nelson and other executive committee members of the Alliance for Academic Freedom (AAF), which describes itself as “progressive scholars and academics who reject the notion that one has to be either pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian.”

Its first sentence leaves little doubt as to where its authors stand: “The Alliance for Academic Freedom condemns the treatment of Rose Ritch, a Jewish undergraduate at University of Southern California who resigned under pressure as vice president of the Undergraduate Student Government following a campaign that featured denunciations of her support for Israel, including some with anti-Semitic overtones.” So strongly does it support Ritch that it scolds Folt and other USC administrators and faculty for not speaking out earlier on her behalf. Its concluding paragraph contains words so pointed one wonders if some of its authors had MESA’s response in mind: “The convergence of hostility to the state of Israel, rising campus intolerance, and social media harassment campaigns has created a toxic environment on some campuses—leading, as they did here, to violations of academic freedom and fair treatment.”

MESA’s lies seek to stigmatize Zionism and declare open season on pro-Israel students.

Khoury and Lockman, speaking for the largest academic association for Middle East studies, omitted the heart of this sordid tale and twisted a university president’s words in their quest to delegitimize Israel and its supporters by stigmatizing them as threats to academic freedom. In practice, as Ritch’s cancelation demonstrates, MESA’s lies seek to legitimize anti-Semitism, stigmatize Zionism as a form of bigotry and declare open season on pro-Israel students. Scholars who respect truth and value common human decency should turn their backs on this disgraced organization.

Winfield Myers is director of academic affairs at the Middle East Forum and director of its Campus Watch program.

A Criminal Enterprise, a.k.a. the Democratic Party Shari Goodman

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/a_criminal_enterprise_aka_the_democratic_party.html

Somewhere within the last few decades, the United States was taken over by a clandestine criminal enterprise working under the radar to infiltrate and gain control of our media, schools, universities, unions, Hollywood, military and our halls of governance at the local, state, and federal level.  They did so in conjunction with a new American oligarchy composed of billionaires seeking a One World Order and all too willing to fund their operations, along with the aid of foreign financiers such as Red China and parts of the oil rich Islamist world.  

Within time, and with much of its funding coming from a billionaire oligarchy, they were able to hijack the entire Democrat Party who were only too willing to sell out the United States to the highest bidders while lining their own pockets with sweetheart deals made with Red China, Iran, and Ukraine.  The admittance of Red China in 2001 into the World Trade Organization, backed and supported by Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, was the beginning of China’s advance and the decline of the United States on the world stage.  As American companies moved overseas along with the millions of lost jobs in cities throughout the United States, Democrats and some Republicans, sold us a bill of goods. 

Truckloads of U.S. Mail Found Dumped in California. So November’s Election Will Be Totally Fine By Victoria Taft

https://pjmedia.com/election/victoria-taft/2020/09/08/truck-loads-of-u-s-mail-found-dumped-in-california-so-novembers-election-will-be-totally-fine-n902855

Democrat assurances that mail-in voting in the November presidential election will be perfectly safe were just found in a heap in the back of a Glendale spa.

Piles of bags of mail and packages were found at two different locations in the city over the weekend.

One dumping was captured on a surveillance camera. The mail was dumped from the back of a Budget rental truck at the spa.

KTLA reports the mail included all sizes of packages.

The first incident was reported at 7:30 a.m., in the 1000 block of Allen Avenue, according to Glendale Police Department Sgt. Christian Hauptmann.

Roughly two hours later, police received another call regarding dumped mail, this time behind a business in the 1600 block of Glenoaks Boulevard, according to Hauptmann.

It was the second reported incident — outside 7Q Spa Laser & Aesthetics — where surveillance video captured the moment a rented truck dumped bags of unopened mail and took off.

“It happened early in the morning, 5:40, and it was a Budget rental — big truck — that backed up to the parking lot. And they’re like, slowly, one by one, they’re dropping the packages,” Lilia Serobian, one of the medical spa’s owners, told KTLA.

She said the “huge pile” contained various size of packages — all of it U.S. mail.

The LA Times reported that the LA area post offices have been like “armageddon” “amid cutbacks” to the postal service. Dead baby chicks and rotting food were found in piles of undelivered boxes, according to the Times.

Whether it’s incompetence, lack of manpower, an intentional slowdown, or all of the above is anyone’s guess. The postal service union has openly criticized the president’s choice to head the Postal Service and has endorsed Joe Biden for president.

NIHILISM: BY EDWARD CLINE

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy.

I emphasize, an impulse to destroy, because it reflects the actions of Antifa and BLM, and of the Dems in the House of Representatives. They want to “cancel”  the Declaration of Independence and our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Cancel culture is, essentially, when people who have said or done problematic things, either now or in the past, are decidedly “canceled,” and people no longer support them or their endeavors. In this day and age, examples are everywhere. Celebritiesgetting called out for problematic behavior. See my column, “New Harvard Math,’

Cancel culture is a program of dedicated nihilhism. Antifa and BLM are active, violent practitioners of nihilism.  

Most commonly, nihilism refers to existential nihilism, according to which life is believed to be without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. Moral nihilism asserts that nothing is morally right or wrong. Existential nihilism is the philosophical theory that our life has no intrinsic meaning or value. With respect to the universe, existential nihilism suggests that a single human or even the entire human species is insignificant, without purpose and unlikely to change in the totality of existence. According to the theory, each individual is an isolated being born into the universe, barred from knowing ‘why’. The inherent meaninglessness of life is largely explored in the philosophical school of existentialism, where one can potentially create their own subjective ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’. Of all types of nihilism, existential nihilism has received the most literary and philosophical attention. See my column, “New Harvard Math.”

The Media Are Lying About The Election Again Trump has cut Biden’s lead by half or more in key battlegrounds, and is on track to win again. By Mollie Hemingway

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/07/the-media-are-lying-about-the-election-again/

Election 2020 is shaping up to be déjà vu all over again for the news media. In an effort to help push Joe Biden over the finish line, the Washington establishment is going all-in on the easily refuted idea that there has been no change in the presidential race over the last three weeks.

“With Two Months To Go, a Steady Presidential Race,” writes Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report.

“The Latest Polls, the Great Non-Tightening: This Week in the 2020 Race,” write Astead W. Herndon and Annie Karni of The New York Times.

“In a time of disruption and unrest, the presidential race has changed little,” writes Dan Balz of the Washington Post.

After having botched the entire news coverage of the 2016 election, where all the “experts” repeatedly told the American public that Donald Trump had little to no chance of being the Republican nominee and even less a chance of being elected president, corporate media are back at it again, insisting all is well with the Biden campaign and the Democrats are safely on cruise control to take the White House and the Senate. Here’s the truth they are not telling you.

Biden has little enthusiasm for his candidacy. He is taking on an incumbent president with significant first-term accomplishments who has extremely energized supporters, to put it mildly. He had two major opportunities in August to generate some real excitement for his ticket and collect voters in must-win states for Democrats who had abandoned the ticket for Trump in 2016. Think Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

1,000 Georgia Voters Face Prosecution for Casting Multiple Ballots By Mairead McArdle

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/1000-georgia-voters-face-prosecution-for-casting-multiple-ballots/

During the state’s primary in June, 1,000 Georgia voters successfully voted twice, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced Tuesday.

The 1,000 Georgia residents cast votes by absentee ballot and then went in person to polling places on June 9 and voted again, Raffensperger said, adding that they will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

Of the 1,000 voters who voted twice, 58 percent requested Democratic ballots, according to Raffensperger’s office. Georgia does not offer the option to affiliate with a political party during voter registration, meaning voters who wish to vote in primary elections must request either a Republican or Democratic ballot.

“While the investigation is still ongoing, initial results show that of the partisan ballots at issue, approximately 58% were Democratic ballots,” a spokesperson for the Georgia Secretary of State said in a statement to National Review.

The secretary of state said that Georgia’s attorney general and local prosecutors will weigh whether to bring charges against the voters on a case-by-case basis.

“A double voter knows exactly what they’re doing, diluting the votes of each and every voter that follows the law,” Raffensperger said at a news conference. “Those that make the choice to game the system are breaking the law. And as secretary of state, I will not tolerate it.”

Voting twice is a felony in Georgia that carries a one to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $100,000.

About 150,000 Georgia residents who requested absentee ballots later appeared at polling places during the state’s primary to vote in person, many because they either never received their absentee ballot or changed their minds and opted to vote in person. However, 1,000 of those voters had already mailed in their absentee ballot and were allowed to vote again by poll workers, although the double votes did not alter the outcome of any primary election, Raffensperger said.

Trump, Race, and Class By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/trump-race-and-class/

The president’s authentic bluntness may be more appealing to non-elites of all races than violence and condescending lectures.

The president’s authentic bluntness may be more appealing to non-elites of all races than violence and condescending lectures.

T here are some stunning indications that the supposedly satanic racist Donald Trump could be polling in some surveys around a 35-40 approval rate among Latinos and 20–30 percent among African Americans. Other polls are more equivocal but suggest an unexpected Trump surge among minority voters.

If those polls are accurate and predict November voting patterns, then Joe Biden could lose the popular vote as well as the key swing states by larger margins than Hillary Clinton’s Electoral College losses in 2016.

Indeed, some state polls by CNN and Trafalgar already show Trump to be near even in these purple states. The polling also suggests that, contrary to stereotypical exegeses, nonwhites of the large cities in the Midwest are not necessarily a monolithic voting bloc. So how can this be — given the Obama verdict that Trump is our generation’s Bull Connor, and the Never Trump assurances that the divisive Trump lacks the empathy and appeal of a “coalition building” John McCain or a BLM-sympathizer such as a marching Mitt Romney, and lacks as well the natural resonance the Bush family enjoys with Hispanics?

A number of things are going on that may explain some of these apparent mysteries.

One, Trump is finally beginning to reshape the Republican Party into a middle-class coalition of all races, deliberately pitted against the boutique leftist rich people in Hollywood, Wall Street, the New York and Washington media, Silicon Valley, and the Washington swamp. Trump boasts far more about lowering minority unemployment than reducing the capital-gains tax, more about reducing drug sentences than the need for unfettered global trade.