"She is a public figure and deserves no special dispensation from debate."

In the Federalist, David Harsanyi writes,

Democrats have spent the past two-plus years accusing the president of the United States and his allies of seditiously conspiring with our enemies to destroy “democracy.” For the most part this fairytale has been cynically deployed by politicians to undermine the legitimacy of a Republican presidency, yet millions of Americans now believe their votes were upended by a foreign power. There is no more serious charge against an elected official than treason.

Then again, for decades before the 2016 election, Democrats argued that Republicans were literally killing their fellow Americans when cutting taxes, murdering the sick when rejecting nationalized health care, and sentencing the poor to death when rejecting socialist schemes. Not to mention suppressing the minority vote when asking for ID, engaging in Nazi-like actions when enforcing existing border laws, and destroying the world when failing to embrace a takeover of the economy. And so on.

...Do reporters and columnists consider the safety of the Trump administration before writing critically about them? I hope not. Because free speech—political discourse and good faith political reporting included—shouldn’t be inhibited by prospective actions of third-party nuts. It is imperative, in fact, that we don’t let those nuts undercut our ability to freely express our political disagreements. If Americans pondered the actions of political terrorists every time they took a position, they would only be empowering criminals.

...Let’s remember one of the times we actually saw overt political violence was when progressive activist and Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer attempted to assassinate the entire Republican congressional delegation. As far as I can tell, no one in the media asked Sanders or any other Democrats to temper their political rhetoric about Republicans. If the reverse had occurred we would have been plunged into a national discussion about right-wing rhetoric. (Wait, what am I saying, Republicans are already asked to take responsibility for violent actions of people who have nothing to do with them!)

...Of course, the notion that someone’s color or ethnicity or religion offers them a dispensation from the political debate is one of the most destructive aspects of this debate.

Democrats chose to rally around Omar, celebrating her immigrant story and appearing with her on magazine covers. Now those Democrats are compelled to cover up and rationalize her comments (though we shouldn’t underestimate how popular some of her anti-Jewish tirades and ugly views of America are among progressives). There is no freshman-level Marxist gobbledygook or conspiracy theory that Omar won’t regurgitate, from claiming that the US was “founded by genocide” to claiming that American power is built through “neocolonialism” to embracing morally decrepit ideas about the Middle East and Jews.

...Now, they’ve moved onto covering for her with “fact checks” and feigned indignation. It is clear to me that Omar was minimizing 9/11, as she does Islamic terrorism in general. It’s clear to me she is a defender of theocrats and an apologist for terror organizations like Hamas. You might disagree. You can view her comments and decide for yourself. Whatever the case, threats of violence against politicians are illegal and should be condemned by any decent person. In the end, though, whether Omar has increased threats against her or not, she is a public figure and deserves no special dispensation from debate.

Read more here.

Debate

A debate between two opposing points of view? Tucker says yes, Joy Reid at MSNBC and other Leftists ay no!



Mark Steyn, who happens to be an Irish-Belgian-Canadian, supports Tucker.

Jason Whitlock has some very good advice for Steph Curry

"I'm a phobia phobe!"

Sundance brings us news that Mark Steyn is no longer on Mark Levin's Conservative Review t.v. show. Steyn is suing. No further details are yet available. Steyn promises something is coming from his side on Monday.

Here is Steyn's last show. He gives a warm tribute to Alan Colmes, who "understood that politics is persuasion."

It's odd that the left is so unforgiving of him for engaging with the right.

Then he gives a tribute to Nigel Farage, who almost single-handedly persuaded British voters to Brexit.

When all you do is label someone, you make debate impossible. Labels are fine if you are in kindergarten on the playground, but by grade three, you should be learning how to debate!

America in 2016: balkanized camps of competing identities

Greg Gutfield writes,

Now we no longer look at a tragedy as an American one, but through the divisive eyes of balkanized camps of competing identities.

... Most of the Democrats see it as a gun control issue. Most Republicans see it as a terror attack.

...The New York Times blamed Republicans for Orlando. The Huffington Post blamed Christians. Every liberal blames guns, as well as the complicit wife of the murderous, terrorist dirtbag. And the dirtbag’s dad blames social networks. He’s even suing them.

...The more we spread the condemnations around, the less we have for the truly guilty party. Hence our incremental approach to ISIS. President Obama treats the war on “terror” (a polite phrase for Islamism), like we’re playing Jenga. Slowly, and on rainy days.

We lose respect for evidence. Our inability to call a spade a spade is the result of divorcing cause from effect. If we can’t call Islamism out for this horribleness, then what’s left? Blame Guns. Christians. White Zinfindal. It’s as though you blame a massive wild fire not on dry tinder and a lit cigarette, but on poor self-esteem among carbon products.

Here’s science: Islamism preaches the murder of gays; then an Islamist murders a club full of gays. Cause…effect.

Why does the left deny science?

The way the media and our White House deny the effects of Islamism seems eerily similar to a certain industry we grew to loathe over time. Remember how the tobacco companies denied the role of their product in lung cancer? To deny that link, now, would have you laughed off the planet. My prediction: 20 years from now we will feel the same way about Islamism.

...We have killed debate. To better enhance well-being, one must be able to argue and even allow oneself to be proven wrong. Science is all about that: prove me wrong, please. Now, no one wants to be wrong, even when it’s an abstract debate.

...What happened to reserve? Contemplation? Thoughtfulness? What about waiting a few days before you spout an opinion?

...We no longer cooperate. This sad and sober consequence is the result of combining all the results mentioned above together. Without cooperation, society is doomed. Cooperation contributes to better lives, over all. If what’s good for you, is good for them you help them get what you have.

That’s not the case in this era of moral relativism.

The problem is: we no longer believe that what we have is good. How can America defeat ISIS if we have vocal factions believing that we are worse? How can we fight the enemy if a large portion of our population thinks an inanimate object – a gun – caused Orlando? And not this pernicious ideology you can’t even call a death cult, because radical Islam is worse than that? It’s a death movement. A death phenomenon. It’s a force that sees our conscious lives as inferior to what happens after you die. Which is why, for them, killing gays is an act of love. They’re doing those sinners a favor – in their twisted skulls, killing innocents in a night club just gave the murdered a Fast Pass to Nirvana.

Read more here.

Was the argument always just about which fat, soft comfortable elites would be in control?

Ace of Spades writes,

...There seems to be a lot of avoidance of the discussion of actual ideas by the party which once upon the time styled itself -- no, really, it did -- as the "Party of Ideas."

Now ideas are passe and kind of dangerous. Now the idea is to hide ideas from the public, and just talk about pablum and loving American and loving grandpa, and having a handsome-but-not-threateningly-so guy deliver this pablum, and thereby manage the voters into giving up a vote without ever actually giving any consent.

You can't avoid the ideas you plan to implement and run on a variety of trivial distractions and then claim some kind of mandate to implement them later.

This isn't the consent of the governed. And this isn't treating the voters as peers worthy of respect.

This is the management of thugs, morons, scoundrels and various sorts of social inferiors who you plainly do not trust to do the right thing (or to believe the right things) by manipulating them by all means except honest persuasion and argument.

Conservatism used to have this sort of everyday egalitarian populism to it -- we trust the people to do the right thing when provided all the information. It's the dreaded liberals who wish to hide their agenda and thereby avoid any actual engagement with the electorate.

Where did that conservatism go?

Or was that always, like so much else, just a stupid faithless lie?

Was the argument always just about which fat, soft comfortable elites would be in control?

Proposed Debate: Let's actually have a debate on open borders, huh?

My nominees for the border security/restrictionist side are David Frum (yes, he's on this side), Mickey Kaus, Mark Krikorian, and Tucker Carlson.

The other side can nominate whatever Open Borders hucksters they like -- probably mostly from the WSJ editorial board and Jorge Ramos. Whoever.

And let's actually see what the public really thinks.

Read more here.

Is Gingrich advising Trump not to debate Cruz?

I just heard a caller to the Mark Levin radio show allege that Newt Gingrich is advising Donald Trump not to debate Ted Cruz. Mark Levin seemed to agree that Gingrich is doing that, because Levin responded to the caller by saying, "Yeah, c'mon out Newt, expose yourself, baby!" Does anyone know if this is true that Gingrich is advising Trump not to debate Cruz?

Prisoners in maximum security prison win debate against Harvard students

Peter Holley writes in the Washington Post,

Last month, a debate team of three inmates with violent criminal records defeated a team of three Harvard University undergraduates.



It sounds like an underdog story plucked from the pages of a yet unwritten Walt Disney screenplay — and in some ways, it is.

But it’s also worth pointing out the fallacy of our underlying assumptions about such a matchup — the first (and most pernicious) being that criminals aren’t smart. If a definitive link between criminality and below-average intelligence exists, nobody has found it.

...The debate took place last month at the Eastern New York Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison about an hour southwest of Bard College. The hosts beat a Harvard team that had won three of four American Parliamentary Debate Association national championships.

To prepare for the competition, the inmates, members of Bard’s Prison Initiative, were forced to acquire knowledge the old-fashioned way: Without access to the Internet, according to the Wall Street Journal. In 2015, can you seriously imagine preparing for anything — purchasing a movie ticket, looking up directions or researching basically anything — without going online?

Complicating their challenge, the Journal noted, was the fact that research requests for books and articles had to be approved by the prison administration, something that could take weeks.

Read more here.