Tag: democrats

As the Insurrection Narrative Crumbles, Democrats Cling to it More Desperately Than Ever

Twice in the last six weeks, warnings were issued about imminent, grave threats to public safety posed by the same type of right-wing extremists who rioted at the Capitol on January 6. And both times, these warnings ushered in severe security measures only to prove utterly baseless.

First we had the hysteria over the violence we were told was likely to occur at numerous state capitols on Inauguration Day. “Law enforcement and state officials are on high alert for potentially violent protests in the lead-up to Inauguration Day, with some state capitols boarded up and others temporarily closed ahead of Wednesday’s ceremony,” announced CNN. In an even scarier formulation, NPR intoned that “the FBI is warning of protests and potential violence in all 50 state capitals ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.”

The resulting clampdowns were as extreme as the dire warnings. Washington, D.C. was militarized more than at any point since the 9/11 attack. The military was highly visible on the streets. And, described The Washington Post, “state capitols nationwide locked down, with windows boarded up, National Guard troops deployed and states of emergency preemptively declared as authorities braced for potential violence Sunday mimicking the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of pro-Trump rioters.” All of this, said the paper, “reflected the anxious state of the country ahead of planned demonstrations.” 

But none of that happened — not even close.

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Eric Swalwell Really Doesn’t Want Americans to Find Out What’s in the Virus Relief Bill

Democrats are trying now to push their pork-zilla Wuhan coronavirus relief bill through the Senate.

As we previously reported, only about 9% of the bill has to do with actual virus-related relief, according to Republicans. Meanwhile there’s a ton of pork to all kinds of Democratic agenda items and constituencies.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) eviscerated the bill.

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Left-Wing Hatred has Escalated Post-Trump.

Hillary Clinton infamously declaimed “half of Trump’s supporters” as “irredeemable” and a “basket of deplorables.” Barack Obama sneered at “bitter” Americans who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them…” Joe Biden condemned “10-15% of Americans” as “just not good people.” This dehumanization of the other, a propaganda tool essential for war and genocide, is a central tenet of America’s New Left—an ideological departure not only from “old-school” liberalism, but from the Constitutional foundations of the nation.

“Classical” liberalism distrusted the state which it saw as a threat to individual liberties. In the 1960’s, this way of thinking evolved into a modern liberalism, which viewed government as the vehicle by which social and economic equity could be achieved. This doctrinal evolution may have been in good faith, but has bloated into a progressive politicization that increasingly controls citizens’ lives with utopian proposals. Thus, the political theory founded on individual liberty from state interference mutated into the present determination to employ the state to enforce ever-expanding moral, economic, and cultural oversight. The reparations effort, climate change, the #metoo movement: all call for government encroachment in the name of liberty (including even the elimination of subconscious racism).

The vilification of those who do not conform to its tenets is fundamental to liberal-democratic dogma. Leftwing hatred went full-throttle following the Capitol assault. Particular care was taken to vilify all conservatives, linking them to the KKK and Nazis. One histrionic editorial published the day after declared: “The lineage between the slaveholding secessionists and the modern insurrectionists could not have been more clear: Both groups were willing to destroy the union and both used violence to deflect their own racial fantasies of power and privilege slipping away.”

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Biden Nominee Vanita Gupta Urged Facebook For More Censorship In Letter

President Joe Biden’s associate attorney general nominee Vanita Gupta urged Facebook in 2018 to adopt more censorship and hate speech policies because of free speech’s “harms” to “civil rights.”

In a letter addressed to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2018, Gupta’s leftist interest group The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights laid out 11 ways the company has neglected what they claim are civil rights. Gupta’s twisted interpretation was that Facebook should therefore engage in increased levels of censorship and content policing.

“As a company whose public mission is to ‘give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,’ Facebook has a responsibility to ensure that the platform is not used to drive bigotry and stoke racial or religious resentment and violence,” the letter states. “But for years, Facebook’s refusal to acknowledge and/or chronic mismanagement of civil and human rights violations occurring on the platform have raised many questions about Facebook—primarily, whether you are willing or able to fix the toxic online environment that you have allowed to flourish.”

The letter goes on to claim that several “harms” are indicative of why Facebook must purge its “toxic environment.” This includes the idea that white men are supposedly protected from hate speech but not black people, “racially charged “advertisements” that suppress voters of color, a lack of “anti-bias training and civil rights education for staff,” as well as “insufficient protections” for users who are attacked by misogynists.

Gupta called for an “audit” of Facebook for allowing “well-documented harms” to exist on the platform. To leftists like Gupta, “hate speech” is not merely rude speech or already outlawed calls to violence, but can include expressing a mainstream conservative perspective or a religious perspective such as that male and female are objectively defined. The letter also claims that Facebook should not look into anti-conservative bias since civil rights are “non-partisan.”

Surely, civil rights are in fact non-partisan. But Gupta conflates authoritarian oppression with freedom and discourse. Facebook and other corporations have colluded to censor conservatives in an unprecedented way for years, and the LCCR’s notion that “civil rights” requires Facebook to remove “hate speech” goes against the very notion of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

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Pete Buttigieg Is Bootleg Obama in the Worst Ways Possible

There’s a famous aphorism often attributed to Miles Davis which says that the notes you don’t play in jazz are more important than the ones you do. Much the same can be said of political memoirs and, indeed, most books written by politicians or professional apparatchiks, particularly if published during an election year: being a genre largely concerned with PR and brand-building, they tend to be heavy on pablum and featherlight when it comes to substance; glorified press releases masquerading as earnest reflections or honest tales of personal triumph in the face of adversity. To any but the most credulous reviewer, they therefore present something of a dilemma. How exactly, after all, are you supposed to write about what isn’t there?

Apocryphal though they may be, this is where the words ascribed to America’s great jazz innovator really come in handy. In my experience as a regular (and almost always reluctant) appraiser of books and speeches by liberal and centrist politicians, identifying the blank space — the things left unsaid, the issues unaddressed, the possibilities elided, the questions unanswered, the past events ignored, the facts omitted, etc. — can often get you quite a long way.

David Plouffe’s A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump, for example, spends just over 250 pages telling readers to canvass, phone bank, and write approving social media posts about a generic and entirely hypothetical Democratic nominee. Tasked with reviewing it, I was initially stumped about what, if anything, to say — an ostensible handbook for fighting the Right with scant reference to ideology, program, or social vision not exactly offering up a lot of raw material with which to work. My writer’s block persisted until I realized that Plouffe’s omissions were precisely the point, his vision of liberalism being one that either treats most real political questions as settled or considers them none of the average person’s business (the permissible kind of rank-and-file activism in the modern Democratic Party being about deference to party elites and not much else).

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