50 years after Tet: can we now show appreciation to our Vietnam vets?

Elise Cooper writes at American Thinker

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive, in which the North Vietnamese orchestrated a massive coordinated attack throughout South Vietnam. A book out in paperback on May 8, entitled The Odyssey of Echo Company: The 1968 Tet Offensive and the Epic Battle to Survive the Vietnam War, takes readers on the journey of Stan Parker. Americans need to be reminded of soldiers like Parker who fought patriotically for this country.

It is a disgusting truth that

"The scariest part of his military career was coming home from Vietnam[.] ... It is the hate they felt back home in the states that haunts these guys." Even to this day, Parker cannot comprehend the reaction of his fellow Americans. "I did not know why they were so hostile. There was even a time we attended a White Sox baseball game and the crowd booed the guys there in wheelchairs. I thought how I had done my job, what was asked of me, and for some reason everyone is mad at us.

"Another incident occurred as I left the Oakland Army terminal. I felt as if I was walking down the jungle trail in Vietnam, unsure of what the next bend would bring. I knew how to defend myself over there, but not here at home. I was called a baby-killer and could do nothing about it. Why? Because we were cautioned numerous times to not get in a fight or we will be detained in the stockade."

He expected the same scorn, disdain, and fear when coming home on leave from Afghanistan. "In late '68, people were very hostile. I felt more at home in Vietnam than I did back home in Gary, Indiana. Neighbors would wave at you but didn't come over to talk, because they didn't want anyone to think that they were pro-military. Yet, decades later, returning from the War on Terror, I received a standing ovation on the plane and was offered a first-class seat. What a culture shock. It was very emotional for me. I did think, Where was this forty years before when I returned home from Vietnam? If one ounce of kindness had been displayed, then it would have made a big difference."

Read more here

Introducing a lie

When you are about to lie, do you introduce it with a Bill Clintonesque phrase like, "I'll be honest," or "But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again..."

“Don’t worry America, I got this. This will be so easy I’ll leave 4 hours early.”

Humans and animals emerged on Earth at about the same time

Nicole Arce reports at Tech Times,

Landmark new research that involves analyzing millions of DNA barcodes has debunked much about what we know today about the evolution of species.

In a massive genetic study, senior research associate at the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University Mark Stoeckle and University of Basel geneticist David Thaler discovered that virtually 90 percent of all animals on Earth appeared at right around the same time.

More specifically, they found out that 9 out of 10 animal species on the planet came to being at the same time as humans did some 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.

Read more here.

A land silenced by intimidation and fear

Justin O. Smith writes at the American Thinker,

The arrest of British free speech activist Tommy Robinson has sent shockwaves across the Anglosphere. The United Kingdom, once dedicated to the values of freedom, has taken a path toward authoritarian government and away from freedom. The once great nation, which created the Magna Carta and once commanded an empire, is now the land of tyranny. Unless the British people love their freedom enough and fight this injustice in fierce fashion, it will remain a land silenced by intimidation and fear.

The authoritarian socialist government of the United Kingdom has been out to get Robinson for years on anything it can. It has harassed, intimidated, arrested, and incarcerated Robinson, as it did last May, since it is now apparently a "crime" to report on the decades-long systematic rape of hundreds of non-Muslim children by gangs of Muslim men, who are now apparently a protected class of people. Lizzie Dearden of the Independent reported that Robinson was arrested for "breaching the peace," no doubt an absurd pretense by the British authorities in light of the documented film footage of his actions.

...Americans should be highly concerned over this case, because the same type of "hate speech laws" used against British citizens are currently being advocated in the U.S. Senate, by Marco Rubio (R), Kamala Harris (D), Susan Collins (R), and Dianne Feinstein (D) and a long list of others. Hillary Clinton pushed the same laws in 2012 and 2015 and 2017. Three similar unconstitutional laws aimed at our First Amendment rights were advanced in our Congress, after being drafted by Emgage USA and the Muslim Public Affairs Council, two Islamic organizations and defenders of designated terrorist organizations and their supporters, according to the Investigative Project on Terrorism. The passage of any such anti-freedom of speech bill would place our country on Britain's same ruinous path.

In only a matter of hours, not only was Robinson illegitimately arrested, but he was taken before a judge without access to his own lawyer, with no trial or due process of law, and he was sentenced to thirteen months in prison. Afterward, he was promptly transported to Hull Prison, where an imminent threat of death awaits him among a prison population that holds a large number of Muslims.

...As we all know, there has been no press conference or detailed explanation of Robinson's arrest from the British government, which further illuminates the illegitimacy of this action. Instead of transparency, the government banned any reports on the trial of the Muslim pedophiles and the arrest and incarceration of Tommy Robinson. Not only were reporters' questions going unanswered, but the reporters were forbidden from even reporting the bare facts of Robinson's incarceration.

Read more here.

Let's think about it, then talk about it!

Stella Morabito writes at The Federalist,

The usual political labels of Left and Right cannot explain the exploding attacks on freedom of speech and conscience that are running rampant today. People are either pro-thought or anti-thought.

...Human resources departments in corporations and institutions across the nation can leverage political correctness to fire any employee who might be overheard or construed to have expressed a politically incorrect opinion. The paralyzing fear of misspeaking on the job has been an issue of concern for at least 10 years now.

... The ACLU now routinely joins the efforts of special interests to force people in in artistic fields (photography, decorating, music, etc.) to apply their creative efforts to ceremonies that directly violate their religious beliefs.

Let’s try to crystallize what this all means. The push for hate speech laws has little to do with promoting tolerance while protecting speech. Compelled speech always—always—all boils down to an effort to control what people think and how.

...The First Freedom: Freedom of Thought
Freedom of thought comes before freedom of speech. We must remember that it is the source of any inalienable right. We ought to be talking about it as though it is. If we don’t recognize this reality, then we can’t protect it.

Let’s remember that all of the other First Amendment rights follow in logical order from the first freedom of religion/belief/conscience/thought. Freedom of speech is the right to express what you think and believe. Freedom of press means the right to record those expressed thoughts in writing or other media. In this vein, freedom of association would mean being able to deliver your ideas to anyone willing to listen. It means the right to peaceably assemble and have open conversation with other people.

...The only way the bubble of political correctness can pop is if all free thinkers are inclined to follow through with the First Amendment. Thinking will only remain free as long as we express our thoughts by speaking them, recording them, and cross-pollinating them through peaceful assembly. Nothing less can insure against the de-humanizing effects of thought policing.

Let’s think about that. And talk about it constantly.

Read more here.

President Trump wants Russia at the negotiating table, pardons, wage growth, Singapore coming up!

President Trump wants Russia at the negotiating table, so it would be G8, not G7.

What about preparing for negotiations with North Korea? One week preparation? They don't work. Just ask Hillary! I've been preparing all my life!

Greg points out that before we instituted the income tax we relied on tariffs and our economy grew. Not so much after the income tax.

Trump missed the climate discussion at the G7. He has a long trip to Singapore to rest up for!

Nancy Pelosi says the good economic news is not important. Last week she was talking about the dignity of MS-13 members. Keep talking, Nancy!

Once again Jesse schooled Juan on wage growth: 2.9%, the fastest since 2009. Consumer confidence is at an 18-year high!

Trump is considering pardoning Mohammed Ali and wants recommendations from protesting sports players of who to pardon next. The Philadelphia Eagles requested policy time, Trump said let's do it, and the Eagles backed down."

Greg notes, "Trump likes to solve problems."

Big blue eyes and a black turtleneck!

John Carreyrou was an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, whose owner, Murdock, invested $125 million dollars in Theranos, a Silicon Valley blood testing company which will be going out of business this August. The founder of Theranos was a nineteen-year-old dropout from Stanford University named Elizabeth Holmes. When Carreyrou started investigating, Holmes went to Murdock. This interview does not say whether Murdock attempted to influence Carreyrou, but Murdock lost his money.

How Obama took lying to new heights

Marc Thiessen reports at Fox News,

...the Obama administration: (1) told Congress it would not allow Iran access to U.S. financial institutions; (2) issued a special license allowing Iran to do exactly that; (3) unsuccessfully pressured U.S. banks to help Iran; (4) lied to Congress and the American people about what it had done; (5) admitted in internal emails that these efforts "exceeded" U.S. obligations under the nuclear deal; (6) sent officials, including bank regulators, around the world to urge foreign financial institutions to do business with Iran; and (7) promised that they would get nothing more than a slap on the wrist for violating U.S. sanctions.

How bad is this? Remove the words "Obama" and "Iran" and replace them with "Trump" and "Russia" and imagine the outrage that would ensue over the same revelations. Democrats would be holding news conferences, and the story would be front-page news.

We hear a lot these days from the media about the danger of presidential lies. Well, when it comes to the Iran deal, the Obama administration took lying to new heights. And no, that's not Fake News.

Read more here.

Candace Owens takes on Ben Shapiro and Trump shows the Right how to wage the culture war

Eric Lendrum writes at American Greatness,

Trump is showing the American Right how to wage the culture war in a way that doesn’t look like a pathetic rearguard action. Only recently has the Right been making significant gains, whether it’s in the Oscars’ collapsing ratings, the unprecedented success of pro-Trump television shows such as “Last Man Standing” and the recently cancelled reboot of “Roseanne,” the inroads made among African-Americans by Trump and the Republicans thanks to Kanye, or the NFL’s recent decision to ban kneeling during the National Anthem.

...most criticism aimed Shapiro from the right flank has turned out to be suicidal for the career of the critic or the desperate acts of fringe figures. But Candace Owens is neither suicidal nor a fringe figure, and her star continues to rise (even leaving her boss, Charlie Kirk, in the dust). She has been welcomed with open arms into the mainstream.

...If their first bout ended with Owens essentially slapping Shapiro across the face and not apologizing, then this one was more like Owens giving him a black eye and then telling him to go screw himself. And if the first round ended with Shapiro simply sulking away without a proper conclusion, this one saw Shapiro ending the battle by waving a white flag, and even delivering a compliment to the person who had just verbally pummelled him.

Candace Owens has just proven that this supposed demigod does, in fact, bleed.

Read more here.

Reform in Iran? No, revolution!

Michael Ledeen writes in Front Page,

...totalitarian regimes, like the Islamic Republic of Iran, can’t be reformed. Remember “Communism with a human face”? We never saw it. Instead, we saw the Red Army crush Alexander Dubcek’s reformists in the streets of Czechoslovakia. Ditto for Mikhail Gorbachev, whose glasnost was widely believed to signal the transformation of Soviet Communism. It didn’t, and the Soviet system wasn’t transformed until Gorbachev was removed, and his successors abolished the Communist state. Italian fascism and German Nazism were both defeated on the battlefield, and abolished, not transformed.

...Totalitarian regimes’ actions stem from two closely linked main causes: ideological doctrine, and the desire of the tyrant to remain in power. Iran’s expansionist foreign policy, which started soon after Khomeini’s seizure of power in 1979, rests on the politico/religious conviction that the Islamic Republic is destined, and entitled, to rule the world. The virtual takeover of Syria by the Guards was ordered directly by Supreme Leader Khamenei as part of that mission, as is the expansion of Hezbollah throughout Latin America.

The destruction or domination of America is central to the regime’s ideology, and is chanted all the time by thousands of people. “Death to America!” is doctrinal, not just a street rally, and this regime cannot abandon it without abandoning its essence.

...Khamenei’s notorious personal wealth is a primary target of the Iranian demonstrators, many of whom are starving. Here, too, the supreme leader’s behavior can’t be changed without fundamentally altering the nature of the regime. The supreme leader uses the money—estimated at several billion dollars—to control the nation’s businesses and to bribe his would-be challengers. This is reminiscent of Ceausescu’s “royal” palaces, designed to awe the masses in an otherwise poor country, and of Hitler’s use of an official architect to enhance the visible glory of the Third Reich. The spectacular mausoleum in Tehran dedicated to the memory of the Ayatollah Khomeini is the same sort of symbol of ideology and power.

Such regimes are intensely resistant to changing their behavior, and it would be a dramatic event indeed if the Islamic Republic’s leaders were to abandon its well established policies without a significant purge of its ruling class, and the emergence of new leadership, dedicated to a very different sort of government. If Trump, Bolton and Pompeo can pull it off, more power to them. But don’t count on it.

Read more here.

Any day now

In case you missed it

"Toxic masculinity"

John Hawkins writes at PJ Media,

...We take a young man and kick his father out of his life, send him to school where he has mostly women teachers, barrage him with negative messages about masculinity, then turn him loose at college where we treat him like a guilty-until-proven-innocent rapist, and after all that, we blame “masculinity” when he goes off the rails despite the fact that he spent a lifetime bathed in femininity. Unsurprisingly, the more women try to change masculinity, the more negative and toxic it actually becomes. Yet, articles explaining how masculinity needs to be changed and rewired—written by women or feminized males—are practically a cottage industry these days.

...When our society treats our husbands as if they’re as important as our wives and our sons as if they’re as important as our daughters, that “toxic masculinity” people love to complain about will start to disappear.

Read more here.

Trump doesn't play!

Sundance writes at The Conservative Treehouse,

Emmanuel from France arrived in Canada two days ahead of the G7 so he could connect with Justin from Canada and plan a unified strategy against U.S. President Trump’s economic position. Not kidding, they really did. Like a plan. Serious. No Joke.

Macron tweeted,

The will to have a text signed by 7 countries must not be stronger than the content of that text. On principle, we must not rule out a 6+1 agreement.

and tweeted some more,

The six other G7 countries combined form a larger market than the American market. This must not be forgotten.

and one other,

The American President may not mind being isolated, but neither do we mind signing a 6 country agreement if need be. Because these 6 countries represent values, they represent an economic market which has the weight of history behind it and which is now a true international force

Sundance continues,

So Emmanuel has a plan for the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Canada, and Japan to stand against U.S. President Trump.

In order for Emmanuel and Justin’s plan to work, they need the U.K., Germany, Italy and Japan to go along with it.

Italy and Japan?

...Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told President Trump the EU wouldn’t discuss any trade deals while the Steel and Aluminum tariffs were pending.

So President Trump removed the “pending” component, and told Wilbur Ross to just make the tariffs begin.

The EU grand plan to use leverage, backfired.

Trump doesn’t play.

A media that will not take responsibility for itself.

"It sparked speculation," says the media (not, "I am speculating!") Is it speculation running amok, or them running amok speculating and debasing themselves? A media that will not take responsibility for itself.

Salena Zito is Andrew's guest today. She is the co-author with Brad Todd of The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics


Why did everybody get this election so wrong? They live in the beltway or with coastal elites. She lives in Pittsburg. "When you live here, you understand the people better. When you parachute into an area, rather than live in the area, it sort of dulls your instincts because you are on such a limited time, you look for the shiny object instead of what is the regular, what is the norm. When she does travel to another town, she stays there a couple of days.

Salena thinks this election was not about Donald Trump, although that is what the pundits and media were focusing on.

King Cyrus Christian voters: evangelical Catholics decided to be pragmatic. Religious liberty more important to them than Trump having the same values. Iowa primaries: Republicans liked Ben Carson and Ted Cruz, but "that Donald Trump? He's a fighter! He would go to the mattresses for us!" That's when I realized he would win the nomination.

What about the midterms? "The Trump coalition is completely intact. They see how the media "have it in for him."

Using the past to justify racial double-standards in the present

Coleman Hughes writes in Quillette,

...The underlying logic of using the past to justify racial double-standards in the present is rarely interrogated. What do slavery and Jim Crow have to do with modern-day blacks, who experienced neither? Do all black people have P.T.S.D from racism, as the Grammy and Emmy award-winning artist Donald Glover recently claimed? Is ancestral suffering actually transmitted to descendants? If so, how? What exactly are historical ‘ties’ made of?

...modern-day blacks are permitted to employ language and behavior for which whites would be condemned. And wherever these racial double-standards show themselves, appeals to historical oppression, and to a metaphorical ‘we,’ follow close behind.

...Consider, for starters, the fact that racial double-standards have been enshrined in our college admissions system. A 2009 study by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade found that Asians and whites had to score 450 and 310 SAT points higher than blacks, respectively, to have the same odds of being admitted into elite universities. Although it’s possible to justify this double-standard without referencing historical oppression—for instance, by arguing that the benefits of increased ethnic diversity on campuses outweigh the costs incurred by whites and Asians—in practice, most defenses of Affirmative Action use the history of white racism as a key link in their argumentative chain. Of course, those who appeal to historical racism for this purpose gingerly sidestep the fact that Chinese-Americans were also lynched in the 19th century, Japanese-Americans were legally barred from owning land in the early 20th, and over 100,000 Japanese-Americans were forcibly interned during World War II.

...Why is it, then, that historical forces are only ever invoked to explain the behavior of blacks?

Though we have not consistently lived up to the principle, liberal democracies decided long ago that the individual was to be the primary unit of moral concern and responsibility. What happened to your parents, grandparents, or fellow tribe members is supposed to be left at the door when it comes time to judge your actions. We do not give Jewish writers free rein to incite hatred against German people because the former’s grandparents were murdered by the latter’s. As tempting as such temporal displacements of justice might be, we’ve learned that indulging them creates an unending cycle of retributive violations.

...Why are blacks the only ethnic group routinely and openly encouraged to nurse stale grievances back to life?

...Whites are noticing that black leaders still use historical grievances to justify special dispensations for blacks who were born decades after the end of Jim Crow—and many whites understandably resent this. Asian students are noticing that applying to elite colleges is an uphill battle for them, and are understandably fighting for basic fairness in admissions standards. The majority of blacks themselves are noticing that bias is not the main issue they face anymore, even as blacks who dare express this view are called race traitors.

Read more here.

Immunity....For What?

Andrew McCarthy writes at National Review that there should be no immunity given to Andrew McCabe in return for his truthful testimony before Congress.

...As we discussed back in April, McCabe has been referred by the inspector general to the Justice Department and FBI for consideration of whether to prosecute him for making false statements to investigators. The false statements occurred during a probe of McCabe’s leaking of sensitive investigative information to the media. Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 35-page report recounts that McCabe gave misleading answers on four occasions when questioned about the leak; falsely claimed that his boss, then-director James Comey, knew about and approved McCabe’s leak; and, to give himself cover, shamelessly chewed out the heads of the New York and Washington field offices over the leak that McCabe himself had orchestrated.

McCabe’s lawyer, Michael Bromwich, now maintains that, because of the criminal referral, McCabe needs immunity if he is to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Clinton-emails case.

...McCabe is trying to make himself non-prosecutable.

...Prosecutors do not like to grant immunity. It was liberally doled out in the Clinton-emails investigation that McCabe ran, but that was an aberration — a reflection of the fact that there was no intention of charging Mrs. Clinton or anyone else with a crime.

A more normal and effective way of proceeding is illustrated by Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation: If the prosecutor has a viable false-statements case against a witness, he makes the witness understand that he is prepared to indict the witness. The witness quickly realizes that his best option is to plead guilty and cooperate (as several witnesses have in Mueller’s probe). Once this is done, if the witness proves to be dishonest, the cooperation agreement is torn up and the prosecutor can bring more charges and push for a more severe sentence. The guilty-plea arrangement, much more effectively than an immunity grant, provides the witness with a powerful incentive to cooperate fully.

...Once McCabe realizes the Judiciary Committee will not give him immunity or otherwise interfere with the Justice Department’s ability to prosecute him, he is apt to become a much more forthcoming witness.

Read more here.

D-Day, June 6, 1944

Today was the 74th anniversary of D-Day, the invasion of Normandy. President Reagan spoke to American vets of Normandy on the 40th anniversary.

Schooling us to hate ourselves, Western Europe is dead, "Grief is a desert that has to be crossed on foot."

Who is president today? Trump? Obama? Bush? Andrew clears that up for us in his opening monologue.

Andrew has noticed that the Left is trying to school us to hate ourselves. Our passions are gifts from God. The whole trick of life is training your passions to the good! Patriotism is a natural passion. You want your patriotism to be informed with the good.

Today is mailbag day. Andrew believes western Europe may now be dead. Devoured by invaders who are coming in to the countries and do not share western values.

Andrew: "Grief is a desert that has to be crossed on foot." You acknowlege your grief and keep walking forward. Get to a place of faith and love and greater knowledge of life.

A parent's job: Leading people to become their best selves.

Are you living in the real world or a cyber simulacrum?

Helen Smith brings us news that suicide is increasing among women. Ace of Spades has some thoughts:

I can't think of a reason for this general trend in women committing suicide more often, except my go-to reason for everything: Society is undergoing the most profound social experiment in history -- shifting the main locus of where life is lived from the real world to a cyber simulacrum -- and that has big effects on people and their psychology and physical health that we will not understand even partly for 30 years. Social competition, evaluations of one's looks, fitness, and lifestyle to check if one is pulling ahead or falling behind in the rat race, bullying and conformity-monitoring, and instant-stress via social media feeds are now things people often experience every minute or two rather than a few times per week.

It may also be that the brain itself has preferred rhythms of excitement and boredom. But with instant stimulation always a key-push away, we might be overstimulating our brains (often with junk stimulation, of course) without giving it the expected lazy pauses in between.

A lot of people think that it's healthy to have a mind at rest on occasion. Anyone who meditates believes that, certainly. And many artists, writers, philosophers, and theologists and scientists have sought out places of quiet (and even boredom) in which to do their deeper thinking.

Add into that the fact that the brain is designed to navigate a physical world of scent and sounds and pheromones, and not a virtual world of text and pictures and pornography. Previous generations have bemoaned man's alienation from God, and man, and society; we're now dealing with an alienation from physical reality itself.

There may well be plenty of benefits to our Always Online Age, but there are undoubtedly huge negative consequences as well.

What are your thoughts?

"Because I have the right attitudes in public, I can do what I like in private!"

Bill Clinton "co-wrote" a book with James Patterson. Mark Steyn says it is his most ambitious work of fiction since his deposition in the Paula Jones case."

Why Trump must be stopped

Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse reports,

There are Trillions At Stake. There is no upper limit to what Congress is willing to do to stop President Trump from turning off the lobbyist funding. Without influence in DC there can be no affluence in DC. That’s why McConnell cancelled the recess.

If the president continues to remain focused exclusively on what is in the U.S. best interests, he must be stopped. Politicians in DC cannot just sit-by and allow the U.S. economy to be based on the interests of Americans; it would mean the destruction of years of central planning by DC Lobbyists, multinational banks, Wall Street and multinational corporations.

♦ Multinational corporations purchase controlling interests in various national elements of developed industrial western nations.

♦ The Multinational Corporations making the purchases are underwritten by massive global financial institutions, multinational banks.

♦The Multinational Banks and the Multinational Corporations then utilize lobbying interests to manipulate the internal political policy of the targeted nation state(s). ...Massive multinational corporations control the majority of production inside each nation and therefore control the global product market and price. It is a controlled system. Expanding the federal subsidy for food purchases is part of the corporate profit dynamic.

With increased taxpayer subsidies, the food price controllers can charge more domestically and export more of the product internationally. Taxes, via subsidies, go into their profit margins. The corporations then use a portion of those enhanced profits in contributions to the politicians. It’s a circle of money.

In highly developed nations this multinational corporate process requires the corporation to purchase the domestic political process (as above) with individual nations allowing the exploitation in varying degrees. As such, the corporate lobbyists pay hundreds of millions to politicians for changes in policies and regulations; one sector, one product, or one industry at a time. These are specialized lobbyists.

♦ With control over the targeted national industry or interest, the multinationals then leverage export of the national asset (exfiltration) through trade agreements structured to the benefit of lesser developed nation states – where they have previously established a proactive financial footprint.

The process of charging the U.S. consumer more for a product, that under normal national market conditions would cost less, is a process called exfiltration of wealth. This is the basic premise, the cornerstone, behind the catch-phrase ‘globalism’.

It is never discussed.

Sundance goes on to explain better how massive multi-billion multinational corporations and institutions are aligned against President Trump.
Read much more here.

Who will McCabe finger?

Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse informs us that fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe

is requesting criminal immunity in exchange for testimony about what he knows of the corrupt FBI operations in 2016 and 2017.

Read more here.

Abuse of our legal and intelligence systems!

Chris Farrell of Judicial Watch has first hand experience running counterintelligence operations while an Army counterintelligence officer. He explains, This was an offensive counter-intelligence operation, not investigation, not constrained like a criminal investigation would be. As early as December of 2015 there is a concerted effort to apply intelligence tradecraft operations to attack and undermine a candidate for the president of the United States! A level of criminality beyond the pale!

Lou adds, Congress is being stymied in its oversight role.

The media narrative on Trump, Miss America without swimsuits

The media narrative: Trump is a racist with a special animus toward black and brown people, and he is a dangerous authoritarian. They become a mythmaking machine.

Jenna Ellis is a guest, talking about the Supreme Court decision on the Colorado cake baker. Jenna is the author of the book pictured below.


The Miss America competition is scrapping its swimsuits and will no longer judge contestants based on physical appearance. Andrew thinks this is a stupid move because female beauty gives people joy in the same way that male bravery does.

Where there is a will, there is a way!

This woman went on a shopping spree at her local car dealership. But, how was she going to get all three cars home? Go here to watch the video.

More job openings than unemployed Americans!

Eric Morath reports at the Wall Street Journal,

The U.S. had more job openings this spring than unemployed Americans.
For the first time since such record-keeping began in 2000, the number of available positions exceeded the number of job seekers, the Labor Department said Tuesday, a shift that is rippling across the economy and affecting the behavior of employers and workers.

U.S. job openings rose to a seasonally adjusted 6.7 million at the end of April, a record high, and more than the 6.3 million Americans who were unemployed during the month. Openings had exceeded the available labor pool beginning in March, according to revised figures released Tuesday.

The figures are the latest sign the U.S. is facing a historically tight labor market....


The last time the rate was lower was in 1969, when young men were being drafted into the Vietnam War.

The labor market is forcing employers to rethink their approach to hiring, said Terri Greeno, owner of an Express Employment Professionals office in Crystal Lake, Ill. She is asking clients if they are being realistic in their demands for workers with clean criminal histories and higher levels of education.

Hat tip Ace of Spades

Targeting Jordan Peterson

At The Tablet, Wesley Yang writes about the Jordan Peterson phenomenon.

...Peterson is both an archetypal victim and beneficiary of these polarized times. In less than two years he has become, with the exception of the American president, perhaps the single most loathed person by the journalistic and intellectual classes in Canada and the United States. He has also become, by orders of magnitude, the most widely disseminated lecturer in the history of the world. He is the sole possessor of a personal platform many multiples the size of all his detractors combined. He does not rely on the gatekeepers of the progressive consensus for his livelihood; indeed he prospers precisely by flouting it. It was his very success in managing this feat at the outset that made it urgent to target him, thereby ramping up the cycle of escalation that has made his platform as enormous as it has become.

...that Peterson doesn’t actually hold the opinions ascribed to him doesn’t matter at all to the keepers of the social media consensus. They’ll just keep repeating false claims, based mainly on cherry-picked quote fragments and evidence-free assertions, until they harden into social fact, immune from correction or clarification.

We are living through a time of pervasive rhetorical overkill and genuine fear. In times of extremism, moderation itself can come to seem the greater enemy to those ideologically possessed.

...So what does Peterson actually believe? He has consistently defended the moral position that the “individual is sovereign over the group,” a unique feature of Anglo-American political theory and practice that holds that citizens hold their rights against the state rather than through it, which is inscribed into our founding documents, and helps to account for the remarkable capacity of societies built around its doctrines to accommodate high levels of diversity while remaining democratic. The underlying sovereignty of individuals forces state power to operate against a hard constraint that limits coercion, and gives individuals the means by which to push back.

Read more here.

What Democrats like and don't like

In recent days Democrats have established their fondness for violent gangs of illegals (MS-13), t.v. stars who call other women with whom they disagree c""ts, but they hate the good economy, and are not moved by the fact that you have a job!

Andrew doesn't like the fact that so many movies now are comic book movies. He brings on a staff member named Jacob who defends comic book movies.

Liberty

My son took this picture of the Statue of Liberty on his recent trip to New York. Did you know that the Statue of Liberty is made of an iron frame with a sheet of pure copper hung over it? The Statue of Liberty is made of copper 3/32in. (about 2.5mm) thick, the same as two American pennies placed together. The internal structure is comprised of cast iron and stainless steel.

“Blue-collar optimists, evangelical pragmatists and suburban vacillators"

In City Journal, Fred Siegel tells us about a book by Salena Zito and Brad Todd.

...“On the back roads and side streets of places like Erie, Pa., and Kenosha, Wis.” emerged voters who never seemed to figure in the networks’ reporting. They were “blue-collar optimists, evangelical pragmatists and suburban vacillators who turned the dials just enough to shock the body politic”—part of a white electorate that, notes analyst Lloyd Green, had seen the loss of more than 700,000 jobs between November 2007 and late 2016.

...Zito and Todd see the 2016 election as representing a tectonic shift in America’s electoral plates. “Far from a fluke, the 2016 election was a product of Obama’s globalist conceits that produced defective trade deals, open borders and an aggressive secularism.” Trump’s victory was his triumph, not the Republican Party’s. Neither the two-time Obama voters who switched to Trump nor the habitual nonvoters who came out to the polls in 2016 saw much to rally around in the GOP. Their ties are to Trump, a finding with implications for the upcoming midterms.

Read more here.

Open, free and unregulated platforms, or regulated to protect our rights?

Kurt Schlichter writes in Town Hall,

When the social media companies start deplatforming conservatives, and engines like Google start up with antics like listing the GOP’s ideology as “Nazism,” we need to respond to their exercise of their power with the exercise of our own power – via our elected representatives. A GOP bill requiring social media platforms to explicitly and clearly explain their content policies, to disclose to banned people their exact violation, to provide a rapid, meaningful appeal process, and to provide for lawsuits (with fee awards to prevailing plaintiffs) to remedy violations is just the first step toward a regulatory solution.

The Fredocons will whine that this is not a conservative solution. Oh. Well, we tried submission and that doesn’t work for us. My conservative principles include fighting fire with a firestorm. Don’t want none, don’t start none – if you exercise your power, we’ll exercise ours. I don’t want to do it, but the two choices are 1) open, free, and unregulated platforms, or 2) platforms regulated to protect our rights. Maintaining platforms that exclude Normals is not an option. So, choose wisely Silicon Valley.

But for most institutions, we have alternative options that don’t necessarily involve leveraging our government power. When companies start deciding they want to modify our behavior by refusing to do business with people the libs hate, like NRA members, we can boycott them. We can also choose to support businesses that don’t disrespect us. There are lots of banks that don’t discriminate against those exercising the Second Amendment. By supporting companies that respect us – and not patronizing ones that diss us (like Dick’s Sporting Goods) – we are effectively building parallel institutions. But we can also create our own businesses from the ground up.

...The truth is that the walls really are coming down – what good is a gatekeeper if you can just walk around the gate? Technology makes production accessible at a fraction of what it used to cost, and the ravenous Internet is starving for content. There’s nothing to stop us conservative from stepping in and doing it ourselves.

...But as we keep seeing, money is not the only motivation to those temporarily holding sway over our cultural institutions. They will take a hit in the pocket book to score their cheap little points against us. We need to confront that nonsense, hard, and raise the cost of liberal virtue signaling high enough that they will think twice before trying it. But we also need to build our own institutions, institutions that meet Normal Americans’ needs, not the needs of some Silicon Valley socialist or Hollywood pinko. And if we don’t, we may well find ourselves exiled from our own society.

Read more here.

Sweep it under the rug!

As Tommy Robinson serves his 13-month prison sentence in England, at National Review Douglas Murray gives us some history of Tommy as leader and founder of the EDL, English Defence League.

Ten years ago, when the EDL was founded, the U.K. was even less willing than it is now to confront the issue of what are euphemistically described as “Asian grooming gangs” (euphemistic because no Chinese or Koreans are involved and what is happening is not grooming but mass rape). At the time, only a couple of such cases had been recognized. Ten years on, every month brings news of another town in which gangs of men (almost always of Pakistani origin) have been found to have raped young, often underage, white girls. The facts of this reality — which, it cannot be denied, sounds like something from the fantasies of the most lurid racist — have now been confirmed multiple times by judges during sentencing and also by the most mainstream investigative journalists in the country.

But the whole subject is so ugly and uncomfortable that very few people care to linger over it. Robinson is an exception. For him — as he said in a 2011 interview with the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman — the “grooming gangs” issue isn’t something that afflicts some far-off towns but people in the working-class communities that he knows. And while there are journalists (notably the Times’ Andrew Norfolk) who have spent considerable time and energy bringing this appalling phenomenon to light, most of British society has turned away in a combination of embarrassment, disgust, and uncertainty about how to even talk about this. Anyone who thinks Britain is much further along with dealing with the taboo of “grooming gangs” should remember that only last year the Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, had to leave the shadow cabinet because she accurately identified the phenomenon.

Which brings me to last Friday. That was when Robinson was filming outside Leeds Crown Court, where the latest grooming-gang case was going on. I have to be slightly careful here, because although National Review is based in the U.S., I am not, and there are reporting restrictions on the ongoing case. Anyhow, Robinson was outside the court and appeared (from the full livestream) to be filming the accused and accosting them with questions on their way in. He also appeared to exercise some caution, trying to ensure he was not on court property.

The latest controversy is maddening for many reasons.
Tommy Robinson is a British political activist and “citizen journalist” who came to prominence in Britain almost a decade ago when he founded the English Defence League. The EDL was a street-protest movement in Britain whose aims could probably best be summarized as “anti-Islamization.” It emerged in the town of Luton after a group of local Islamists barracked the homecoming parade of a local regiment returning from service in Afghanistan.

From their earliest protests the EDL’s members sought to highlight issues including sharia law, Islam’s attitudes toward minorities, and the phenomenon that would become euphemistically known as “grooming gangs.” In reality these protests often descended into hooliganism and low-level violence (naturally helped along by self-described “anti-fascists”). The authorities did everything they could to stop the EDL, and the media did everything possible to demonize them. In a foretaste of things to come, very few people made any effort to understand them. And nobody paid any price for (indeed many people benefited from) claiming that the EDL was simply a fascist organization and that anybody who even tried to understand them must be a fascist too. The usual prohibition against sweeping generalizations doesn’t seem to apply if the generalization tilts in that direction.

I interviewed Tommy Robinson five years ago, after he had left the EDL (having by his own admission failed to keep extremists including actual neo-Nazis away from the movement). As he said then, one of the problems of everyone insisting that a particular movement is campaigning for the Fourth Reich is that the few people who think that sounds like a great idea will show up. Whatever his other faults, there is no evidence that Robinson thinks that way. Indeed he was once charged with assault for head-butting a Nazi sympathizer who wouldn’t leave an EDL protest. Not many people bothered with those details. The assault got reported, but not the cause. So the fact that Robinson had head-butted a Nazi became yet more evidence that he himself must be some kind of Nazi.

Anyhow — Robinson wised up slightly, and eventually began to plow his energies into a type of citizen journalism/activism. Some of this has been remarkably brave, some of it remarkably wrong (such as a video he made after last year’s Manchester Arena attack, in which he seemed to furiously suggest that everyone living around a particular mosque in the area must be some type of enemy combatant), and some remarkably ill-advised — not least because it has allowed him to be presented in the worst possible light.

For example, a couple of months ago Robinson went to Italy. In May of last year an Italian television crew reporting on migrants in Rome had been attacked by some migrants near a local train station. The female presenter was assaulted, and the whole thing became big news in Italy. But in the normal modern European fashion, after much tut-tutting everybody went back to the safe semantic discussions we like to have. Such as whether or not the term “no-go zone” is exactly appropriate to describe an area where a female journalist cannot go without being physically assaulted. So round and round we go.

Ten years ago, when the EDL was founded, the U.K. was even less willing than it is now to confront the issue of what are euphemistically described as “Asian grooming gangs” (euphemistic because no Chinese or Koreans are involved and what is happening is not grooming but mass rape). At the time, only a couple of such cases had been recognized. Ten years on, every month brings news of another town in which gangs of men (almost always of Pakistani origin) have been found to have raped young, often underage, white girls. The facts of this reality — which, it cannot be denied, sounds like something from the fantasies of the most lurid racist — have now been confirmed multiple times by judges during sentencing and also by the most mainstream investigative journalists in the country.

But the whole subject is so ugly and uncomfortable that very few people care to linger over it. Robinson is an exception. For him — as he said in a 2011 interview with the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman — the “grooming gangs” issue isn’t something that afflicts some far-off towns but people in the working-class communities that he knows. And while there are journalists (notably the Times’ Andrew Norfolk) who have spent considerable time and energy bringing this appalling phenomenon to light, most of British society has turned away in a combination of embarrassment, disgust, and uncertainty about how to even talk about this. Anyone who thinks Britain is much further along with dealing with the taboo of “grooming gangs” should remember that only last year the Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, had to leave the shadow cabinet because she accurately identified the phenomenon.

Which brings me to last Friday. That was when Robinson was filming outside Leeds Crown Court, where the latest grooming-gang case was going on. I have to be slightly careful here, because although National Review is based in the U.S., I am not, and there are reporting restrictions on the ongoing case. Anyhow, Robinson was outside the court and appeared (from the full livestream) to be filming the accused and accosting them with questions on their way in. He also appeared to exercise some caution, trying to ensure he was not on court property.

But clearly he did not exercise enough caution, a strange fact given that last year Robinson had been found guilty of “contempt of court” for filming outside another rape-gang trial, one involving four Muslim men at Canterbury Crown Court. On that occasion Robinson was given a three-month prison sentence, which was suspended for a period of 18 months. Which meant he would be free so long as he did not repeat the offense.

Although Robinson appeared to be careful at Leeds Crown Court last Friday, to dance along the line of exactly what he could or could not livestream outside an ongoing trial with a suspended sentence hanging over his head was extraordinarily unwise. What happened next went around the world: The police turned up in a van and swiftly arrested Robinson for “breach of the peace.” Within hours Robinson had been put before one Judge Geoffrey Marson, who in under five minutes tried, convicted, and sentenced Robinson to 13 months. He was immediately taken to prison.

Read more here.

Words of wisdom

“The ghosts of June 4th have not yet been laid to rest.”

Twenty-nine years ago tonight a huge invasion force entered into the city of Beijing under strict orders to clear Tiananmen Square by six a.m. on June 4. Remember Tak-man?


Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse brings us a documentary of the events that led up to June 3, 1989 and tells us that Secretary of State Pompeo today memorialized Tiananmen Square

Against the jousting backdrop of Chinese influence over North Korea; and remembering that U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is –right now– in Beijing discussing the future of U.S. and Chinese trade relations; and understanding that even mentioning the 1989 Tiananmen uprising/massacre is forbidden in China

Pompeo said,

On the 29th anniversary of the violent suppression of peaceful demonstrations in and around Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, we remember the tragic loss of innocent lives.

As Liu Xiaobo wrote in his 2010 Nobel Peace Prize speech, delivered in absentia, “the ghosts of June 4th have not yet been laid to rest.”

We join others in the international community in urging the Chinese government to make a full public accounting of those killed, detained or missing; to release those who have been jailed for striving to keep the memory of Tiananmen Square alive; and to end the continued harassment of demonstration participants and their families.

The United States views the protection of human rights as a fundamental duty of all countries, and we urge the Chinese government to respect the universal rights and fundamental freedoms of all citizens.

Read more here.

Nature is Scary tweeted, Insane reflexes!

Insane reflexes pic.twitter.com/qnyUdNgCKw

— Nature is Scary (@TheScaryNature) January 3, 2018

Another interview by the competent and fair journalist, Maria Bartiromo

"The White House is running this!"

Did you know that Ambassador Downer helped funnel $25 million dollars to' the Clinton Foundation before he met with Papadopolus? I didn't. That is one reason why we need to keep watching Judge Jeanine!

Rosenstein whines about extortion! Jim Jordan: "It can't be extortion when it is your constitutional duty!"

Judge Jeanine: "What we need is McConnell and Ryan to put their big boy pants on and do something about this unending investigation, and the FBI and DOJ are stalling, redacting, not complying with subpoenas. Judge Jeanine asks, "What are you guys gonna do?" Jim Jordan answers, "We are going to start deposing witnesses this month."

Kellyanne Conway joins Judge Jeanine to talk about President Trump's 500th day in office, which happens tomorrow. "We're more prosperous, more secure, and the government is more accountable!" "Only 7 times in the last 48 years has the unemployment rate been below 4%."

Rod Blagojevich may be pardoned by Trump. I thought Blagojevich was close to Obama! Blagojevich's downfall ultimately came from his desire to trade Obama's vacant Senate seat for something valuable to himself, accoding to David Freddoso in the Washington Examiner. Freddoso continued,

Blagojevich was also pretty confident that the corruption case against him would not amount to anything. "It'll just fade away," he said. In fact, he would be impeached by a unanimous vote of the state legislature in less than two months' time, and sentenced to 13 years in prison in December 2011.

The recording of Blagojevich and Pritzer contains a few other fun nuggets. At one point, in discussing the potential benefits of appointing Pritzker as treasurer, Blagojevich mentioned that he could play up the candidate's connection to the banking industry. Pritzker discouraged this, because Superior Bank had failed under the stewardship of his sister, Penny.

"She was chairman of the bank," Pritzker explained in mentioning its collapse. "It had subprime loans. I mean, bad stuff."

Penny Pritzker was subsequently appointed Secretary of Commerce by President Obama.

Judge Jeanine notes that all other presidents always wait until their last week in office before pardoning people. Trump is doing it now, transparently, and he doesn't care about criticism. Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich after Rich's wife gave millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. He also pardoned his brother Roger Clinton for cocaine trafficking.

U.S. birth rate hits new record low

A headline at Science alert:

US Fertility Rates Have Plummeted Into Uncharted Territory, And Nobody Knows Why

Peter Dockrill writes,

The US birth rate has hit a new record low, with women in nearly every age group giving birth to fewer babies than a year ago.

New figures show just 60.2 babies were born in 2017 for every 1,000 women of 'childbearing' age (15-44) – a low not seen in the US since officials began charting national birth rates decades ago.

The statistic – contained in new provisional birth data for 2017 released by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – is what's called the general fertility rate (GFR), which saw a 3 percent fall from the rate in 2016: the largest single-year GFR decline since 2010.

...What's more, the TFR is now clearly hundreds of births short of what is called 'replacement': the level of births needed for a generation to replicate its population count.

In the US, that marker is 2,100 births per 1,000 women – well above the current 1,764.5 – although the shortfall is nothing new: the CDC says the US birth rate has generally been below replacement since 1971.

Continuing the theme, the total number of births in the US for 2017 was 3,853,472 – a 2 percent fall from 2016's count, but also the third straight year showing a decline, resulting in what is now the lowest number of births in 30 years.

Read more here.

Why you can't just send a woman to Home Depot

Misanthropic Humanitarian shares this joke with us:

While installing a new door, I found that one of the hinges was missing. So, I asked my wife Mary if she would go to Home Depot and pick up a hinge. Mary agreed to go. While she was waiting for the Manager to finish serving a customer, her eye caught a beautiful bathroom faucet. When the Manager was finished, Mary asked him, "How much is that faucet?" The Manager replied, "That's a gold plated faucet and the price is $5,000". Mary exclaimed, "My goodness, that's an expensive faucet - certainly out of my price range." She then proceeded to describe the hinge that I had sent her to buy. The Manager said that he had them in stock and it was $3.49, then he went into the backroom to get one. From the backroom the Manager yelled "Ma'am, you wanna screw for the hinge?" Mary shouted back, "No, but I will for the faucet."

Will the United States exit NAFTA?

Will the United States exit NAFTA? Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse says it is not a question of "if," but a question of "when." He explains clearly and in great detail here.

Self-preservation

Sundance writes at The Conservative Treehouse,

Many people have noted the bizarre number of former Obama Administration DOJ, FBI and Intelligence Community officials who have gone to work within the U.S. media apparatus in order to protect their interests.

Former CIA Director John Brennan now working for NBC; former DNI James Clapper now working for CNN; former FBI Chief Legal Counsel James Baker now working for Lawfare blog; former FBI Supervisory Special Agent Josh Campbell now working for CNN; former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes now working for MSNBC…. the list goes on. All motives transparently political.

Notably absent, the hiring of any actual journalists.

All of these pre-positioned forces are defensive in nature. All of their collective narrative constructs stem from a self-preservation instinct. The U.S. media has imploded onto itself and devolved into an Kafkaesque assembly of political narrative engineers churning out fake news 24/7.

Read more here.

Trump foreign policy

What is the nature of the Trump foreign policy? Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse believes,

The nature of the Trump foreign policy doctrine, as it has become visible, is to hold manipulative influence accountable for regional impact(s), and simultaneously work to stop any corrupted influence from oppressing free expression of national values held by the subservient, dis-empowered, people within the nation being influenced.

There have been clear examples of this doctrine at work. When President Trump first visited the Middle-East he confronted the international audience with a message about dealing with extremist influence agents. President Trump simply said: “drive them out.”

Toward that end, as Qatar was identified as a financier of extremist ideology, President Trump placed the goal of confrontation upon the Gulf Cooperation Council, not the U.S.

The U.S. role was clearly outlined as supporting the confrontation. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates needed to confront the toxic regional influence; the U.S. would support their objective. That’s what happened.

Another example: To confront the extremism creating the turmoil in Afghanistan, President Trump placed the burden of bringing the Taliban to the table of governance upon primary influence agent Pakistan. Here again, with U.S. support. Pakistan is the leading influence agent over the Taliban in Afghanistan; the Trump administration correctly established the responsibility and gives clear expectations for U.S. support.

If Pakistan doesn’t change their influence objective toward a more constructive alignment with a nationally representative Afghanistan government, it is Pakistan who will be held accountable. Again, the correct and effective appropriation of responsibility upon the influence agent who can initiate the solution, Pakistan.

The process of accurate regional assignment of influence comes with disconcerting sunlight. Often these influences are not discussed openly. However, for President Trump the lack of honesty is only a crutch to continue enabling poor actors. This is a consistent theme throughout all of President Trump’s foreign policy engagements.

The European Union is a collective co-dependent enabler to the corrupt influences of Iran. Therefore the assignment of responsibility to change the status is placed upon the EU.

The U.S. will fully support the EU effort, but as seen in the withdrawal from the Iran Deal, the U.S. will not enable growth of toxic behavior. The U.S. stands with the people of Iran, but the U.S. will not support the enabling of Iranian oppression, terrorism and/or dangerous military expansion that will ultimately destabilize the region. Trump holds the EU accountable for influencing change. Again, we see the Trump Doctrine at work.

Perhaps the most obvious application of the Trump Doctrine is found in how the U.S. administration approached the challenging behavior of North Korea. Rather than continuing a decades-long policy of ignoring the influence of China, President Trump directly assigned primary responsibility for a reset to Beijing.

China held, and holds, all influence upon North Korea and has long-treated the DPRK as a proxy province to do the bidding of Beijing’s communist old guard. By directly confronting the influence agent, and admitting openly for the world to see (albeit with jaw-dropping tactical sanction diplomacy) President Trump positioned the U.S. to support a peace objective on the entire Korean peninsula and simultaneously forced China to openly display their closely-guarded influence.

While the Red Dragon -vs- Panda influence dynamic is still ongoing, the benefit of this new and strategic approach has brought the possibility of peace closer than ever in recent history.

No longer is it outlandish to think of North Korea joining with the rest of the world in achieving a better quality of life for its people.

Not only is President Trump openly sharing a willingness to engage in a new and dynamic future for North Korea, but his approach is removing the toxic influences that have held down the possibility for generations. By leveraging China (through economics) to stop manipulating North Korea, President Trump is opening up a door of possibilities for the North Korean people. This is what I mean when I say Trump is providing North Korea with an opportunity to create an authentic version of itself.

What ultimately comes from the opportunity President Trump has constructed is entirely unknown. However, the opportunity itself is stunning progress creating a reasonable pathway to prosperity for the North Korean people. Chairman Kim Jong-un has the opportunity to be the most trans-formative leader within Asia in generations; but it is still only an ‘opportunity’.

Whether Kim Jong-un can embrace openness, free markets and prosperity is yet to be seen. Freedom is a precariously scary endeavor because there’s always a danger loosening the grip on control can lead to fear, which can lead to even tighter more authoritarian, control.

The commonality in all of these foreign policy engagements is the strategic placement of responsibility upon the primary influence agent; and a clear understanding upon those nation(s) of influence, that all forward efforts must ultimately provide positive results for people impacted who lack the ability to create positive influence themselves.

One of the reasons President Trump is able to take this approach is specifically because he is beholden to no outside influence himself. It is only from the position of complete independence that accurate assignments based on the underlying truth can be made.

Read more here.

Twitter Tidbits

On A Ledge Somewhere tweeted,

Hillary said she’d like to be the CEO at Facebook “because of the immense power it has over the world’s flow of information.”

(Except for a villain in a Batman movie, who talks like that?)

MSNBCPR tweeted,

Happy to announce @brhodes is joining @NBCNews and @MSNBC as a Political Contributor. The former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications for President Obama makes his debut appearance on @MeetThePress this Sunday and @allinwithchris on Monday.

Stephen Miller responded,

“How can we as a network put an end to a perfect week that has seen our entire credibility shredded?”

They're back!

My family has returned from New York and the smile has returned to my face!

She's a jewel!

Imprisoning the boundaries of debate in a box. If you go along with that, you hand the Left their victories.

This live question and answer program was recorded on May 29. The first question was the pro abortion vote in Ireland and the celebrations after the vote, which passed by over 70% of the vote. Mark says in a remarkably short period of time, Ireland has become just another secular European state. Their Prime Minister is a gay, childless Hindu. Mark says the changes in Ireland are what happens when you have a controlled media climate. The assumptions in which issues are raised are all those of the Left. It becomes natural for people to accept the narrative, a default setting as the air that you breathe.

Tommy Robinson: can anything be done to get him out of jail? Tommy was savagely assaulted the last time he was serving at Her Majesty's pleasure. When the judge was informed of that fact, she said, "So what?" In his recent four minute experience of been arrested, charged, convicted and sent to prison, the judge in Leeds said nothing about the likelihood that Robinson's life is in danger.

Mark has met Tommy and found him to be intelligent, engaging, and charismatic. I agree! In Britain you run up against a snob factor, because he is a street guy and the "respectable" classes dislike that about him. If all the respectable types rule certain subjects to be out of bounds, then people will turn to the "unrespectable" leaders.

In the U.S. we have a two party system and both parties decided they didn't want to talk about immigration. So, a significant number of people said we'll go for this guy, Trump!

The forces have been set in motion to wreck the nations of Europe. The establishment cannot admit they were wrong. Contrast the way the establishment hunts down and imprisons Robinson with the cold-hearted indifference to the victims of the rapegangs. Mark spent many hours listening to the rape victims in Rotherham and says it is remarkable how the press in Britain has avoided reporting on it. It is still going on! These girls and girls in many other cities and towns in England have been sacrificed on the altar of diversity, and there is no outrage!

The lack of curiousity that prompts you to intellectual inquiry is something Islam and the Left have in common.

Spies spend a lot time waiting and they are doing fairly ordinary things and wear regular clothes (not like black-garbed Ninjas. James Clapper is in the spy business. There are a lot of freelancers, such as Stefan Halper, whose connections to the CIA go back to the days of when George H.W. Bush ran the CIA in the 1970s. He volunteered in the Bush presidential campaign in 1980. He is someone who is useful to US and Brish intelligence.

Papadopolous is a young, impressionable campaign volunteer with the Trump campaign. Downer's assistant tells Papadopolous that the Australian High Commissioner wants to meet you and have a drink with you. If he invited him to the Australia House it would all be on the record. No, he invites him to the Kensington Wine House in the evening for drinks.

Adam Schiff says none of this happened, and if it did, it is just standard operating procedure!

The audio recording of this question and answer program is here.

Fruit discrimination

The Maltese professor disappears!

Dan Bongino would bet his right thumb on the theory that Spygate was an entrapment investigation. But, who set it up and why? The FBI interviewed a Maltese professor named Joseph Misfud in February. Misfud supposedly had information about the Russians having dirt on Hillary Clinton and fed it to a low-level Trump staffer named George Papadopolous. This was going to be pulled out later as evidence the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians. But, now Misfud has disappeared!

Will they bring down the Mullahs?

Did you know that since December Iran has been the scene of daily strikes? Truck drivers are the latest. They have been on strike for eleven days. Taxi drivers have now joined the strike. Hank Berrien reports at the Daily Wire.

Infringement

Guest post
by Suzann Darnall

It seems to me that one more time, in various suggested ways, different levels of our government are planning on infringing (one more time) upon our freedom as Americans to exercise our Second Amendment right to bear arms. We already have too many laws and restrictions that merely hamper law-abiding citizens and do nothing to deter those who would do harm.

It is all being done in a wave of emotion following the mass shootings that have occurred recently. Particularly in response to those shootings which have taken place in schools. But, I am not sure it is being sufficiently thought through. Seems more like somewhat panicked emotional responses to what are undoubtedly horrible events. But, acting rashly seldom fixes a problem. Such acts usually have unintended consequences and merely exacerbate the problem.

One “plan” being floated here in Texas could possibly mean that legally licensed and armed citizens would have to live in fear of somehow being caught in a hidden aspect of the law if the convoluted “plan” was implemented. There are already laws covering carry, storage, age limits, weapons types, and licensing. In other words, pretty much anything and everything that is done illegally when a shooter goes into a school, church, or some other public venue. Criminals and those who would do harm do not follow the rules. They find ways to go around the rules and restrictions. More rules and restrictions only hurt the citizens who legally and lawfully own guns.

We simply do not need more laws. As I already stated, we have laws that cover pert near any and every aspect of owning, selling, buying, using, carrying, and storing a weapon. I cannot think of one aspect of life with a firearm that does not seem to have one or more laws attached. What we do need is a way to have these laws enforced. And, we also need those who are in favor of gun control to realize once and for all that CRIMINALS do not obey laws, so none of these laws will affect their behaviors!

If citizens are unable to easily carry and access their loaded weapons, what good are the guns for protection? Do celebrities, politicians, banks, and other guarded entities expect their armed security teams to keep all weapons unloaded whenever in the vicinity of groups including children under the age of 18? Or, do they expect no one to have guns except the military and police? Are politicians, celebrities, banks, jewelry stores, and other currently weapon guarded entities willing to take their chances being protected only by being able to phone 911, like the anti-gun crowd seems to think will work for all the rest of us?

I am sad to see even formerly Second Amendment supporting politicians allowing themselves to be led further off the path of Constitutional liberty. If they truly want to keep our children safe, stop making schools “Gun Free Zone” soft targets. Allow our children to be protected by armed good guys ... just like the banks, the jewelry stores, the celebrities, and the politicians.

What part of “shall not be infringed” do these gun-control advocates not get???

Follow Suzann at WoolyMammoth.Org

"This is the verdict!" Tommy Robinson, a man of immense courage, is arrested, charged, convicted, sent to prison in five minutes!

"Cheers Mate!" That is how Tommy Robinson greets people on the street. In the video at the bottom of this post, he is doing the live stream that caused him to be arrested, tried, and convicted and sent to prison, where he is hugely at risk of being killed by Muslim inmates, in less than five minutes!

It begins with him attempting to talk to four of the alleged rapists as they enter the courthouse in Leeds. One of them told him to "fuck your mother." "It doesn't seem like anyone has much guilt. It doesn't seem like anyone is ashamed." Ten men were facing verdicts that day of rape, trafficking, child abduction, supplying drugs, making threats to kill, inciting a child into sexual activity, false imprisonment, inciting children to engage in sexual activity, possession of extreme pornography...Of the hundreds of victims, eighteen came forward, some as young as eleven-years-old. 29 people are on trial.

Tommy gets interrupted by a man who puts his arm around Tommy, who asks him what he thinks about the rapists. He answers, "That's not my concern!" He points his finger at Tommy and tells him it is not his (Tommy's) concern. Tommy turns to the camera as the man walks away and tells the camera, "That is the problem! "It's not my concern, it's not your concern!" The man asked Tommy, "What's it got to do with you? "I'm an Englishman, and the victims here are English girls! It's got everything to do with me!"

Tommy is careful to stay off the property of the court and talks about his suspended sentence and how he could be sent back to prison if he got on the court property while live streaming.

The trial has been split into three sections. Part one has been concluded, awaiting verdicts. Part two is this one in which the jury are making their verdict now. Part three starts in September. The young children have to sit and watch for a year! In each town and city they are picking out one group to try, but there are hundreds, says Tommy. He plans to sit in the court when the jury reads the verdict. He is not allowed to report the verdicts or the interactions in the court, but he will "keep the footage!"

No fan of the cowardly media, Tommy refers to them as "presstitutes." He notes that there is no media covering this trial. Names of the girls' families were posted online by the media! "It is all part of the operation of the far Left to silence people!

Common denominator? 30% of the accused men are named Mohammed! If you mention that fact, you are a bigot and fascist! Rotherham is the town where 1400 girls were raped by Muslim "grooming gangs." A Muslim man walks by and he and Tommy exchange friendly greetings. Tommy then goes on to explain that this is not about individual Muslims but about Islam and those who adhere to its teachings.

Tommy realizes he is "walking a thin line," because he is on suspended sentence to prevent him from reporting on these rape trials.

A man comes up and asks if he can take Tommy's photo. Tommy thinks he wants a picture with him and Tommy, but the man immediately hides his face in fear.

More police arrive "because they think I am going to be hostile."

When the rapists are convicted (in previous cases) their wives and families come out of the courtrooms screaming how the victims are "slags."

Another man on trial comes walking by Tommy and says to Tommy, "Your wife is a prostitute!" A Muslim man drives by a woman bystander and swings his hand across his throat, warning her that this is what he will do to her.

More and more people come by to take selfies with Tommy, who is unfailingly polite and gracious.

Tommy explains how the Sikh community has organized to protect their daughters from the jihadi Muslims.

Boko Haram's leader says Mohammed commands his followers to take non-Muslim women as sex slaves.

The judge looks out the window at Tommy.

Then, he is arrested, tried, found guilty, and sent to prison within five minutes.

Desperate times call for desperate measures?

At PJ Media, David Solway writes,

...the nation is split pretty much in half. One half wishes to destroy the other through a series of destabilizing tactics: electoral fraud, fake news, negonomics, industrial dereliction, globalist doctrine, climate change scam, university indoctrination, Blue State model primary and secondary education, the divisive concept of a “living constitution,” trade deficits, pro-Islamic logrolling, radical feminism, gender dysphoria, pro-choice abortion favoring a sub-replacement fertility rate, runaway entitlements, censorship-prone social media monopolies like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google, the abolition of the Second Amendment, open borders, caravan immigration, sanctuary cities, politically correct -- and in some places, compelled -- speech, judicial overreach, ubiquitous surveillance of American citizens, foreign policy surrender and revolutionary advocacy.

...Despite the election of a people’s candidate like Donald Trump, the Left’s power continues to grow and consolidate.

...guerilla outfits like Antifa need to be declared domestic terrorists and face the might of a loyal military. Groups that play the racist card to extort illegitimate advantages and sow discord should be put on notice. UN-supporting globalists need to go the way of desuetude along with an anti-American anachronism like the UN itself. The U.S. should deal diplomatically with nations on an individual basis rather than subsidize a Wilsonesque institution mired in corruption and Security Council obstructionism. The Democratic Party and their assorted Republican allies should be exposed for the oligarchic fifth column they are.

Read more here.

The Tommy Robinson drama

Douglas Murray writes in National Review,

...In March, Robinson was suspended from Twitter, where he had almost half a million followers. The social-media site (which merrily allows terrorist groups like Lashkar e-Taiba to keep accounts) decided that Robinson should be suspended for tweeting out a statistic about Muslim rape gangs that itself originated from the Muslim-run Quilliam foundation. And it is on this matter that the latest episode in the Robinson drama started — and has now drawn worldwide attention.

Ten years ago, when the EDL was founded, the U.K. was even less willing than it is now to confront the issue of what are euphemistically described as “Asian grooming gangs” (euphemistic because no Chinese or Koreans are involved and what is happening is not grooming but mass rape). At the time, only a couple of such cases had been recognized. Ten years on, every month brings news of another town in which gangs of men (almost always of Pakistani origin) have been found to have raped young, often underage, white girls. The facts of this reality — which, it cannot be denied, sounds like something from the fantasies of the most lurid racist — have now been confirmed multiple times by judges during sentencing and also by the most mainstream investigative journalists in the country.

Here is the livestream of Tommy Robinson outside the Leeds Court. In the last minute of the livestream he is arrested for "breaching the peace."


Murray continues,

...The problem — as I said in 2015 — is that any challenge Robinson presents is all a secondary issue. The primary issue is that for years the British state allowed gangs of men to rape thousands of young girls across Britain. For years the police, politicians, Crown Prosecution Service, and every other arm of the state ostensibly dedicated to protecting these girls failed them. As a number of government inquires have concluded, they turned their face away from these girls because they were terrified of the accusations of racism that would come their way if they did address them. They decided it wasn’t worth the aggravation.

By contrast, Tommy Robinson thought it was worth the aggravation, even if that meant having his whole life turned upside down. Some years ago, after crawling over all of his personal affairs and the affairs of all his immediate family, the police found an irregularity on a mortgage application, prosecuted Robinson, convicted him, and sent him to prison on that charge. In prison he was assaulted and almost killed by Muslim inmates.

What can be said with absolute certainty is that Tommy Robinson has been treated with greater suspicion and a greater presumption of guilt by the United Kingdom than any Islamic extremist or mass rapist ever has been. That should be — yet is not — a national scandal. If even one mullah or sheikh had been treated with the presumption of guilt that Robinson has received, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the rest of them would be all over the U.K. authorities. But different standards apply to Robinson.

...So it will continue. Tommy Robinson will be in prison for another year. And all those people happy with the status quo will breathe a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness that troublemaker has gone away.” Yet their real problem has not gone away. There is no chance of their real problem going away. Because they have no plan for making it go away.

They have a vague hope, of course, which is that at some point soon in the coming generations this will all simmer down and the incoming communities will develop similar views about the status of women as the rest of society. And perhaps we will get there someday. But it is telling that the apparently tolerable roadkill en route includes one young man from Luton — and thousands of raped girls.

Read more here.

More Drivers Killed Under the Influence of Drugs Than Alcohol

In US News, Alexa Lardieri reports,

SOME 22.3 PERCENT OF fatally injured motorists who were tested for drugs tested positive for marijuana in 2016, a figure that researchers say has "increased substantially" in recent years as states have legalized the drug for recreational or medicinal use, according to a new report.

The finding, in a study released Thursday by the Governors Highway Safety Association, was one of several regarding the growing prevalence of drugs in vehicle fatalities. The report also found that 44 percent of drivers killed in automobile accidents in 2016 who were tested for drugs tested positive for one or more substances – a number that was up 28 percent from 10 years prior. That figure eclipsed the 37.9 percent who were known to have been tested for alcohol and tested positive – a figure that actually fell in the last decade, from 41 percent in 2006.

Read more here.

Branco is the best!

Did this vague statement justify a counterintelligence probe into a presidential campaign, featuring a spy and secret surveillance warrants?

Mr. Downer, the Aussie who gave information to the US Embassy in London

Kim Strassel writes at the Wall Street Journal,

For months we’ve been told the FBI acted because it was alarmed that Mr. Papadopoulos knew about those hacked Democratic emails in May, before they became public in June. But according to the tipster himself, Mr. Papadopoulos said nothing about emails. The FBI instead received a report that a far-removed campaign adviser, over drinks, said the Russians had something that might be “damaging” to Hillary. Did this vague statement justify a counterintelligence probe into a presidential campaign, featuring a spy and secret surveillance warrants?

Unlikely. Which leads us back to what did inspire the FBI to act, and when? The Papadopoulos pretext is getting thinner.

Meltdown in the coarsened culture

Samantha Bee used the "c" word because the "f" word has been drained of its power! The audience cheered deliriously, not because there was a thrilling trapeze act, but because Samantha Bee used the "c" word!

On the other hand there are the protected classes: they are Muslim, black, gay, transgender, whatever is next down the pike, about whom you cannot say anything. Only people who are associated with Trump, or who are religious conservatives, a very narrow sliver of people on whom you can unleash the blizzard of "f" and "c" words!

It is killing comedy. It was scripted. They have writers. Where was the joke?