Field Day 8/24/17: Charlottesville and the Media

I’ll start with the fallout from the Charlottesville protest, counterprotest, and violence.  A couple nights ago, President Trump held a rally in Arizona where he spent around 20 minutes condemning the mass media for lying and misrepresenting him and the facts.  Most of it was warranted, some was him stretching the point.  (I heard various reports say it was 16 minutes of talking about the media, others that said 30.  I listened to it and it seemed longer – more like 25, but the consensus seems to be about 20 focused minutes.)

This is from the NYT yesterday, condemning Trump for going after the media.  The story itself isn’t much more than the usual media caterwauling we’ve come to expect in the last year, but it’s noteable for one thing buried in the middle of it that exemplifies the problem:

Its lead items on Wednesday were about attacks on journalists in Charlottesville from both white nationalists and counterprotesters aligned with the so-called antifa movement.

So-called?  (Screenshot in case it disappears.)  So-called?  No problem identifying the white national socialists, but the international socialists barely get mentioned and get the dismissive “so-called”, insinuating that they aren’t really a problem at all.

What seemed to particularly sting on Wednesday was the way that Mr. Trump had impugned journalists’ patriotism.

“Claim bias. Fine. Claim elitism. Fine,” Mr. VandeHei of Axios wrote on Twitter. “But to say reporters erase America’s heritage, don’t love America, turn off cameras to hide truth, are to blame for racial tension, is just plain wrong.”

Anyone with a passing interest in history knows that the founders viewed an independent press as essential to democracy. Talk about heritage.

Anyone with a passing interest in history knows that we don’t have a democracy.  We have a republic – if we can keep it.

Journalists aren’t patriotic.  They’ve been actively trying to get the president to fail since Trump was elected, and they want the country to suffer for it.  They actively believe that half the country are neo-Nazi reactionary racist hicks who are too stupid to be trusted to live and so they need to be beaten into submission, and they’ll do so with any story and any angle they can.

They just spent the last year ranting about how Russia (which Hillary did favors for in a cash for uranium deal, lest we forget how they were Democrat friends two years ago), right up until it was basically proven the story was nonsense.  Even hard-left Salon.com came to the realization that the subject was being changed because the “Russia collusion” story was BS and independent analysts have come to the conclusion it had to be an inside source – namely someone like the murdered Seth Rich.

Last week the respected left-liberal magazine The Nation published an explosive article that details in great depth the findings of a new report — authored in large part by former U.S. intelligence officers — which claims to present forensic evidence that the Democratic National Committee was not hacked by the Russians in July 2016. Instead, the report alleges, the DNC suffered an insider leak, conducted in the Eastern time zone of the United States by someone with physical access to a DNC computer.

The Russia collusion story, despite being thrown on the front page of every leftist rag for the last year, turned out to be, as communist and CNN personality Van Jones called it – a “nothingburger”.  Meanwhile asking about Seth Rich’s unsolved murder is decried by the media as “right wing conspiracy”… that’s been debunked by… Snopes.  Y’know, two leftists, their cats, and a spam server to keep urban legends circulating to generate traffic.

At Charlottesville, the media went out of their way to ignore that there was violence on both sides, exactly as President Trump stated.  We have video of it.

The white racist identitarian national socialists – and yes, that socialism part puts them on the left, whether they like it or not – had a permit to march.  They were legally entitled to go make fools of themselves, but then Antifa decided to attack them, as Antifa does.

Antifa has the wonderful self-made justification that any violence they do, especially attacks they make, are completely righteous and absolutely correct, because they call themselves “Anti-Fascist”, and everyone knows fascists are bad, so ergo they can attack anyone they view as a fascist.  And anyone who opposes them must be a fascist, because they exist as a force solely to oppose fascism.  It’s a wonderful circular logic that completely ignores their roots as communist rioters that go back nearly a hundred years.

One thing both sides commented on was the lack of police presence.  Like we’ve seen in Berkeley over and over and over in the last year or so, the police are ordered to stand down by appointed police chiefs on leftist mayors’ orders.  In the case of Charlottesville, VA, the mayor is a leftist Democrat and pal of Obama and Podesta who works with the hard leftist Center for American Progress.  He’s horribly left.  His vice mayor, also a Democrat, is more entertainingly terrible, in that he’s a sexist racist homophobe.

These are the kind of people who tell the police to stand down because they identify with Antifa.

CNN did an accidentally honest piece on Antifa that they had to go back and edit.  This is the unedited version, still around on the Wayback Machine:

And this is the edited version, to delete the whole “they start violence everywhere they go” part:

The video story actually shows that the reporter doesn’t unmask Antifa at all.  In fact, the Antifa terrorists (because they use violence for political ends and are thus the very definition of terrorists) keep their masks, hoods, and glasses on while talking about how they have to be able to commit crimes with impunity in the name of “social justice”.

Or, y’know, so they can stab people for having the wrong haircut.

A “confused anti-fascist” swung a knife towards the face of a man with a haircut similar to the one popular with white nationalists.

Joshua Witt, 26, was getting out of his car at Steak ’n Shake in Sheridan, Colorado when a man ran over to him yelling, “Are you one of them neo-Nazis?”

The man aimed for his head over his car door, but Witt blocked the blow with his hand, which needed three stitches.

“I threw my hands up and once the knife kind of hit, I dived back into my car and shut the door and watched him run off west, behind my car.”

Witt, who is in no way a neo-Nazi, joked that he believes it was indeed his haircut that confused the anti-fascist, and said he’s considering changing his style. He has no other marks that would make his attacker mistake him for a white nationalist, he said.

But it’s not really a surprise that a bunch of violent socialist revolutionaries would begin attacking people who look like their racial and political enemies.

For those who haven’t seen what Antifa actually stands for (hint: mostly communist Anti-American violence and racism against anyone who’s not in lockstep with them), here’s some examples of their propaganda and events:

Did I mention Antifa was racist?

Antifa really seems to like hitting black people who disagree with them.  Seeing as how Antifa are collectivist identitarian racists, that makes sense, because someone who disagrees with them and is of a different skin-color is the kind of person who is a visual affront to their violence and stupidity just by existing.

Basically, Antifa is this:

Charlottesville VA Riot & Violence Explained – Sargon’s TWIS 8/13/17

Sargon identifies the root problem with this as the racial-collectivist, racist identitarian politics of the progressive left (also frequently called the regressive left or illiberal left) now being adopted by defensive whites who may or may not have been racist before, but now they’re certainly on their way there.

There have been actively racist and racial-based movements for several years now from non-white groups directed at white (and treated-as-white Uncle Tom non-white) Americans, and now there’s a reactionary white-identitarian movement.

None of these groups whether white, anti-white, black, or anything else are representative of American virtues.  They are exactly as Sargon calls them out – racist identitarian collectivists, both the same thing with colors reversed.  Antifa, BlackLivesMatter and the anti-Western anti-white progressive-left racists of academia have perpetuated hatred against “white America” for so long, and so vehemently, that now there are white people who have been radicalized by that hatred.  Call them racists for so long and eventually they don’t care.

The same has probably been true in the past the other way at various times and to varying degrees of severity, with various ethnic groups demonized by a majority, but rather than simply stop at equality, for the last few decades (starting with racist policies like affirmative action), and the absurd notion of “pendulum swing”, we end up with this.  Rather than have equality and recognize individuals as being of value based on the content of their character and logic of their policies and ideas, skin color became a deciding factor.  The idiots who thought that injustice in the form of “pendulum swing” would make for “social justice” are getting the response from people who feel oppressed – and can point to ways they objectively are.  Tear down their monuments and erase their history and reject their racial identity while celebrating your own – and call for genocide of white people, and they’re eventually going to become the same kind of racial group you’re accusing them of because they’ll see there is “institutional power + privilege” being levied against them – the same thing the regressive racist left has imagined for years and used to attack white people (most notably in this last election by blaming the white working class for electing someone they hate).  The mass media and academia decry whites every day, and now those who’ve lost their cool are responding.

A few years back, when Greece was going through more strife than it is now, there was a neo-Nazi party concerned with Greeks called “Golden Dawn” that started gaining in popularity.  It was completely nazi in the National Socialist vein – interest in socialism for the nation, and only the ethnic nation (by far a bigger old-world problem).  It got to be a rather large movement, and for a while, there were people in the US comparing it to the Tea Party, a comparison which those who payed attention (including Greeks) rejected.  The Tea Party called for less government, fewer taxes, rejected bad health-care policy, demanded that if they were getting taxed that they get back what was taken from them, and were generally concerned with economic policy (started by this economics rant), and to a lesser degree social policy being mandated from DC.  Golden Dawn was concerned with ethnic Greeks being taken care of by the socialist Greek government, rather than taking care of foreigners landing on their soil.  There was no comparison other than that both had nationalist tendencies – the Tea Party loving America’s classic liberal/enlightenment heritage and conserving that philosophy and history and demanding a return to it, Golden Dawn loving the Greek people and their socialist government providing for the Greek people and noone else.  The alt “right” (who share more in common with the left than the actual right in the US) are basically America’s Golden Dawn.  Unlike the racist Golden Dawn that occured much more naturally in a nation that’s also an ethnic nation-state; these racists in the US had to be created – and they were brought together by persecution – from the racist American left.

Good job, leftists.  You’ve created a racist greivance group that has some racist greivances against you, and they’re going to use your tactics against you.

–

As a final note, Trump’s response to this, quoted in the video – is fantastically presidential – he calls out both sides for their violence and racism in a fair, even-handed, calm role as a national leader.  I used to be very critical of Trump, but during the election his interviews and word of mouth about how he talked with and listened to people brought me around – but now his even-handed response here condemning both racist sides of this violence as the responsible groups they are – this makes me proud of him as a president.

It would be good if more Republicans and Democrats would support him, but there seem to be Republicans too busy acting like Democrats to bother, and Democrats too busy being hard leftists to bother recognizing why this is going on.

Sheriff David Clarke Shuts Down Don Lemon & The Leftist #BLM Lie

Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke makes clear the law enforcement perspective… and one shared by most of the nation regardless of color.  The best exchange is above.

The later part, after cutting to commercial to protect Don Lemon from further looking like a biased chump and useful idiot, is what CNN posted.  It’s 30 seconds of Don Lemon saying, in effect – if you want to have a conversation, you need to shut up and agree with me, then Lemon running interference for racist Black Lives Matter while saying “that’s a different conversation” every time the Sheriff brings up a point.

Sheriff Clarke is elected by the people of the county to provide law enforcement for them.  He is as direct a representation of what a community wants in law enforcement as is possible in a representative democratic republic.  And based on that first exchange, it sounds like he’s got the community’s interests at heart – both the citizen community and law enforcement community, as they are one and the same (7).

Normally I’d say it’s a safe bet Sheriff Clarke won’t be invited back… but then again, if it generates ratings, views, and hits, CNN may recognize they should have someone on besides their party loyalist mouthpieces.

The Left’s Criminalization of Dissent

Stumbled over this piece on the Daily Beast the other day about how illiberal college students and their enabling leftist professors want to ban history:

Students at Western Washington University have reached a turning point in their campus’s hxstory. (For one thing, they’re now spelling it with an X—more on that later.) Activists are demanding the creation of a new college dedicated to social justice activism, a student committee to police offensive speech, and culturally segregated living arrangements at the school, which is in Bellingham, up in the very northwest corner of the state.

Students have the right to push for robust changes to campus conditions, of course. But if administrators care about free speech at all, they will ignore these calls to create an almost cartoonishly autocratic liberal thought police on campus.

Prefacing the hard-leftist demands with “of course” is an odd thing to include, unless one agrees with almost all of the demands.  Otherwise, it would have gone without saying.  The cartoonishly autocratic “liberal” thought police are exactly what the left wants.

Even a writer for the leftist Daily Beast that sympathizes with them has started to wonder about how far the left has gone, and see much of the problem:

At the heart of this effort lies a bizarrely totalitarian ideology: Student-activists think they have all the answers—everything is settled, and people who dissent are not merely wrong, but actually guilty of something approaching a crime. If they persist in this wrongness, they are perpetuating violence, activists will claim.

It’s not bizarrely totalitarian.  It’s completely understandable.  Their ideas are untenable, fail when left to reality, failed in experience in the past, and so in order to continue they must criminalize dissent to protect those failed ideas.

This is not new, nor is it limited to college speech codes.  It’s endemic to those on the left who know their ideas fail.

Take threats of criminal charges against those who question global warming climate change:

Attorney General Loretta Lynch has considered taking legal action against climate change deniers.

The United States’ top lawyer told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the Justice Department has ‘discussed’ the possibility of a civil lawsuit against the fossil fuel industry.

She said any information her office has received has been sent to the FBI in a bid to build a case.

With evidence of data tampering on the side of Manbearpig believers, with predictions about weather that continually fail to materialize, with even believers of anthropogenic global warming not feeling it’s really a threat, it’s come to finding threats to the Manbearpig orthodoxy and going after them as criminals.

Of course, we’ve already seen this with Mark Steyn being sued and targeted for criticizing the Hockey Stick graph.

I started looking for a video on that specifically, but instead found this video of him talking about criminalizing of dissenters to a goverment panel and citing numerous examples:

It’s relatively short, but hits a few extra places dissent is being criminalized, mostly in the realm of climate “science”.  Because of course one of the critical parts of the scientific method, right after “observation of experiment” and “conclusions of experiment”, is “organize government to punish potential dissenters”.

Dinesh D’Souza vs Leftist College Student

Really sharp guy.  Covers a lot of topics as he refutes lefty social justice arguments – eventually by personalizing the demands that SJWs make and putting them to the SJW.

He uses Alinsky’s rule 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”

The SJW college student is just foolish enough to engage the discussion that his flawed and failed ideas cannot hope to win.  That’s why SJWs drop/change subjects, deflect, call people racist, and use the “shut up” response to any and all criticism.

Open Borders Activists – Stabbed In The Back By “Migrants”, Raped by “Migrants”

Via Gateway Pundit:

A high profile open borders activist was nearly killed in Dresden. He was attack by six or more Arabs and stabbed in the back outside a Pizzeria. (Stop Hate Crimes)

**Julius has protested the PEGIDA anti-immigrant invasion movement, and campaigned for illegal alien rights.

No doubt, Julius still supports the migrant invasion of Germany.
Breitbart.com reported:

A pro-migrant, open borders activist is reported to be “very sad” after being stabbed twice in the back by a gang of “Arabs” as he stood outside a pizzeria in Dresden, east Germany.

Twenty-nine year old ‘Julius G.’ involved himself in political activism while reading his degree in industrial engineering Technical University of Dresden. Now he may have fallen victim to his own politics, as the refugee advocate was attacked while waiting for friends in Dresden’s Neustadt, known as the city’s ‘left wing’, or ‘alternative’ quarter.  …

The student didn’t think the motivation was robbery, as nothing was taken after the stabbing.

This sounds a bit familiar.

The Democrat Moran didn’t get a brain after getting hit at 60mph by an illegal, and neither will this German clown.

There’s something intrinsic about the open-borders self-hating burn-the-west redistributor leftists on both sides of the pond that make them really feel they deserve crimes inflicted on them by illegals and “migrants”.

Julius G. was “sad”, just like Democrat Moran.  Democrat Moran, despite being hit by an illegal alien wearing a mariachi outfit, no less, said this afterwards:

I know this is a tough issue that we’re dealing with and as you probably know I have been and will continue to be pro immigrant and some cases even pro illegal immigrant. And it would be politically expedient for me at this point in time to change that. That should give you some indication of my commitment to immigration and immigrants to tell you that even after being hit by one I will continue to advocate for immigrants and their rights as citizens of this country.

He’s advocating for illegal aliens having “rights as citizens”, which they don’t, because they aren’t.

Julius G. was “sad” because his ideology won’t let him see that the people trying to stop the surge of immigration into Germany would’ve kept him from getting stabbed and left to die, and his ideology is to inflict those same wounds on his countrymen, regardless of what they want… same as Moran.

And just to further illustrate this, there are activists who’ve been raped by the “migrants” they’re trying to support, only to be silenced so as “not to damage the cause”:

A young, female ‘No Borders’ activist working in a migrant camp on the France-Italy border remained silent about her gang rape by Sudanese migrants for over a month because “the others asked me to keep quiet.”

Colleagues are alleged to have said that reporting the crime would set back their struggle for a borderless world.

The ‘No Borders’ activist had dedicated a month of her life to helping migrants. Her group was stationed between Italy and France in Ponte San Ludovico in Ventimiglia when the atrocity occurred, according to reports from local papers La Stampa and Il Secolo XIX, and now reported in the major Italian national Corriere Della Serra.

One Saturday night, as loud music played at a nearby party, the woman was reportedly trapped in a shower block set up near the camp in a pine forest know as Red Leap.

A gang of African migrants allegedly raped her there, and her cries for help are said to have gone unheard because of the music.

La Stampa reports that the woman, around 30 years of age, would have reported the horrific crime were if not for her fellow left-wing activists, who convinced her that if the truth got out it could damage their utopian dream of a world without borders.

But Corriere Della Serra also reports that some of her fellow activists are now accusing the woman of reporting the rape out of “spite,” because her group was withdrawn from the camp following a separate controversy.

Maybe she should’ve said they were a lacrosse team, or that they were gamers.  Then she might have been listened to.

European woman against third world illegal migrants?  Looks like her fellow left-wing activists consulted the progressive stack and told her to “check her privilege”.

Field Day 10/13/15: Obama Says Something Stupid About Iran, About That Iran Deal Anyway, Illegal Immigration, Gamergate Bomb Threats, and Playmates

Via Legal Insurrection, Obama says Republicans are the same as Iranians chanting “Death To America” because Obama logic.

“Just because Iranian hard-liners chant ‘death to America’ does not mean that that’s what all Iranians believe,” Obama said to strong applause from the audience.

“In fact, it’s those hard-liners who are most comfortable with the status quo,” Obama said Wednesday afternoon. “It’s those hard-liners chanting “death to America” who have been most opposed to the deal.”

“They’re making common cause with the Republican caucus,” Obama said to laughter and wild applause.

Just like how a toothless deal that lets Iran have nuclear weapons means Iran won’t have nuclear weapons.  Because you’re racist or something.

Speaking of the Iran deal, why are we doing that anyway?

–

A reminder about presidential candidate Jeb Bush and what he thinks of illegal aliens breaking into the country with their first steps as violation of laws:

Yes, they broke the law, but it’s not a felony. It’s an act of love.

Some people love money.  We call them bank robbers.

Some people love hurting people.

2015 was predicted to be another high-level year of illegal aliens showing up… which has proven to be true, but it’s more easily hidden due to infrastructure built up last year, and it is slightly less than last year.

–

Via HotAir, a footnote to #gamergate from August, that a debate was broken up by bomb threats deemed credible enough to evacuate.

Apparently several calls had been made to the Miami PD and Miami Herald indicating that a bomb would go off at 2:45 PM, and though apprised that this has happened before to #GamerGate, the authorities weren’t taking any chances.  They sent everyone back a couple blocks and cleared the entire neighborhood surrounding the venue.

Stuck standing outside in the 96 degree Miami heat, suddenly the journalists present were extremely interested in what #GamerGate had to say, and many of them were seen giving interviews there on the street.

–

Playboy magazine has decided to drop full nudity.

Can’t help but wonder if it’s at least peripherally related to the Army & Air Force dropping “adult sophisticate” magazines including Playboy in 2013.

Adieu, Cheri.

Field Day 9/4/15: Citizenship, Racism, Turmoil, and One Old Pilot Takes His Last Flight

Whole lotta stuff to go back and note.  Hopefully not too jumbled up, just going through stories of interest from the last couple weeks.

Birthright citizenship was recently the subject of no small amount of discussion – especially how exploitation of jus soli “the law of place” meant that anchor babies are a viable means of getting into the US.  First off – it costs the US taxpayers and existing US citizens a huge amount of money.  Ultimately the reason you have a country is because it’s either bonds of ethnic kinship (for most of the world) or bonds of creed (for the US – ideally – and a handful of other nations).  You joined together to take care of your own first, then depending on the nature of your country, help others as you see fit.  Not put yourself at a disadvantage to someone who breaks in to your home.

In 2003 in Stockton, California, 70 percent of the 2,300 babies born in San Joaquin General Hospital’s maternity ward were anchor babies, and 45 percent of Stockton children under age six are Latino (up from 30 percent in 1993). In 1994, 74,987 anchor babies in California hospital maternity units cost $215 million and constituted 36 percent of all Medi-Cal [California’s Medicaid program] births. Now [2005] they account for substantially more than half.

The article goes on to mention how once they hit 18, they bring in family.  That was intended back when immigration laws were modified in the 1960s.  Democrats saw their opportunity to bring in low-skilled, low-wage labor that would gravitate towards their pandering and handouts.  Ted Kennedy was no small part of the push for it as well.

Ho brings up some points, but also misses some:

We begin, of course, with the text of the Citizenship Clause. To be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. is simply to be subject to the authority of the U.S. government.

And with a simple policy and interpretation change, that could go away.  Someone who’s illegally in the country wasn’t inspected by an immigration official and can be considered to have border nexus and even being on “the functional equivalent of the border” definition could be moved to apply to them – meaning they wouldn’t legally be in the country because they weren’t allowed in, even if they were physically in the country by breaking in.  They’re not subject to the jurisdiction of the US government – they’re simply here illegally.

The law has two terms for people who come to the country – immigrant and non-immigrant.  The definitions are pretty lame, with non-immigrant being someone who comes in on a non-immigrant visa, and immigrant being anyone else.  Take away the idea the word immigrant from illegal aliens and you have someone who’s not blurring the lines between legal immigrants and illegals.  It also gives room for returning to “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US – which was originally written to exclude Native American tribes who were on US soil but not US citizens, because they were considered members of other nations.

Go back to illegal aliens being members of their own foreign nations, and the problem is solved.  No more anchor babies, and those poor aliens can be repatriated to their ancestral homelands to once again share in the bounty of success of their rich, diverse cultures.

—

An Alabama detective feared being labeled racist… so he let himself get roughed up.  When the choice is between temporary pain of a whooping and the longer term legal suffering and targeting that comes with the charge of wrongthink by the media especially when you’re innocent, it’s probably better to just get roughed up.

Instead of following policy to try to get the man back in the car, the officer says he hesitates. It’s just enough time police say for 34-year-old Janard Cunningham to sucker punch the officer, knocking him unconscious. He then allegedly takes the officer’s gun and uses it to pistol whip him.

From Bob Owens at Bearing Arms:

This is the world that the criminal-coddling, police-hating mainstream media hath wrought…

There’s no small amount of irony in CNN reporting this story, and the attack’s callous aftermath, which saw sick criminal supporters take mocking photos of the unconscious officer instead of attempting to help him. After all, they’ve done so much to fan the flames of discord that have bought us to this point, with their serially dishonest portrayal of lawful self-defense shootings by police officers and citizens alike…

And this is the world that the police hating mainstream media hath wrought…

Miles is accused of killing Deputy Darren Goforth, 47, in northwest Harris County. Investigators say Deputy Goforth had worked an accident scene at around 8:30pm, then went to a gas station on Telge and West Road. As he was pumping gas, detectives say Miles approached Deputy Goforth from behind, said nothing and fired multiple shots. Once he fell to the ground, authorities say Miles fired more shots at the deputy. Deputy Goforth was pronounced dead at the scene.

It’s not yet a return to the bad old days of the 70s as far as the violence goes, but the rhetoric and justification for the violence by the leftist media is certainly at a fever pitch.

Meanwhile, in Waller County, TX:

WALLER COUNTY, Texas — A group of armed members of the New Black Panther Party marched on the Waller County Jail Wednesday afternoon chanting “The revolution is on… Off the pigs,” and “Oink Oink… Bang Bang!” The group of about fifteen Black Panthers exercised their First and Second Amendment rights. The group was met in Waller County by a large contingent of Harris County (Houston) Sheriff’s Office deputies.

It went peacefully, mostly because it was a standoff, and because when you’re chanting “kill the cops” in front of them, if you do something stupid you’re going to get mowed down.

First off, I’m supportive of them exercising their First and Second Amendment rights.  An armed society is a polite society – presence of arms kept both sides from acting the fool because both sides knew the consequences of their actions.  But I don’t think it’s terribly productive to protest someone while armed saying “we want to kill you”.  Not exactly from the pages of Dale Carnegie’s books.

I’ve said it before with regards to gun control in California – no small part of that state’s slide into draconian laws was done as a response to a Black Panther march on Sacramento that scared the white people in power.  Everybody lost for that.  It was a loss for the average citizen who committed no crime but lost a right, it was a loss to the CA government and the Panthers because it ended discourse and started a backlash by the power structure.  The grievance wasn’t really heard when a threat was made.

Same goes here.  If you don’t chant “die pigs die” (yes, it’s only reported they said “off the pigs” but it’s the same thing), you might get a better response.  Sling your arms like Open Carry Texas does and have the same march without the death threats and you’ll get a much better response.  The action also further illustrates the hypocrisy of the left – if a group decided to protest other government officials with “off the ____” – making threats against higher elected officials (especially Democrats), they’d be jumped on by the FBI so fast their heads would spin.

This is a lot more effective display anyway – assuming one’s concern is about lives:

That turns down rhetoric and shows a desired goal of racial/ethnic harmony.  Of course, that’s assuming one believes that groups like #blacklivesmatter (apparently run by white leftists) actually give a crap about any lives and aren’t just pushing for their own hard left political angle.

The effects of that kind of ramping up of hate and distrust of local/state authorities is a good way to build up more demands for federalizing the police and controlling everything from DC.  The answer is always more power for those who want even more power.

It’s also why the “police acted stupidly” with the professor, why “if I had a son he’d look like Trayvon”, etc., is always the first thing the pres says, while at the federal level, anyone who questions Eric Holder about the Obama ATF sending guns to narcoterrorist cartels is racist because Eric Holder is black.  (And to the Obama administration, Mexican lives don’t matter unless they’re illegally in the US voting for Democrats).

It’s also how people started making excuses for a narcissist news reporter murderer:

Revenge race murder: Bitter black reporter who gunned down white ex-colleagues live on air and posted the video online blames Charleston shootings and anti-gay harassment in manifesto

…he professes a deep respect for other mass shooters like Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho.

‘Also, I was influenced by Seung–Hui Cho. That’s my boy right there. He got NEARLY double the amount that Eric Harris and Dylann Klebold got…just sayin’.

He goes on to say that he has faced both racial and sexual discrimination as a black, gay man and that he was just waiting to explode.

‘Yes, it will sound like I am angry…I am. And I have every right to be. But when I leave this Earth, the only emotion I want to feel is peace…’

‘The church shooting was the tipping point…but my anger has been building steadily…I’ve been a human powder keg for a while…just waiting to go BOOM!!!!’

At one point in the manifesto he even confesses to killing his cats in a forest close to where he lives, blaming the news station for the animals’ deaths.

Except that apparently nobody really discriminated against him.  He just blamed other people for his problems.

Flanagan, 41, had ‘a long series of complaints against co-workers nearly from the beginning of employment at the TV station,’ said Dennison, now an official with the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources.

‘All of these allegations were deemed to be unfounded. And they were largely under along racial lines, and we did a thorough investigation and could find no evidence that anyone had racially discriminated against this man.’

Yeah, no one disliked him because of his skin color or his orientation.  But the media provided and he readily took in a steady stream of toxic “everyone hates you because you’re black/gay/something and they’re racists/homophobes/somethinghaters and thus you’re justified in your actions“.

Welcome to the new leftist America, where if someone has a different opinion than you that you find distasteful and against leftism, you can go tell them how to live, and when they tell you to get lost, you can attack them.  And the police.

RACINE, Wis. (AP) – Authorities say a Racine man was arrested after forcing his way inside a home to take down a Confederate flag placed in a window. …

A criminal complaint says a woman and Boatner told police he had politely asked her to remove the flag from her kitchen window Friday, and she moved it to another window.

According to the complaint, both started yelling, and the woman used a racial slur toward Boatner. Authorities say Boatner pushed the woman down and walked into the house to remove the flag. According to authorities, Boatner later argued with police and struggled to avoid being handcuffed.

Sticks and stones will break your bones if you use words that hurt my feelings.

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Everything’s Trump these days (rather than Cruz, Walker, or Paul), but a reminder… people hate leftist ideas from Obama but love them from Trump.

By being loud and obnoxious, he’s bringing things to the forefront that sometimes need to be discussed – illegal aliens murdering US citizens, for example.  He’s also getting free airtime that’s being redirected away from better, actually conservative candidates with voting records who weren’t Democrats a couple years ago and didn’t invite Hillary to their weddings.

If you think that “people hate ideas from Obama but love them from Trump” is an exaggeration, consider this:

My broad opinion of Trump is negative for reasons I listed a couple posts ago, but he is shaking things up.  There is some good in that, and assuming he sticks to his “I won’t run third party” pledge, hopefully he loses the primary and directs his energy more towards Democrats rather than Republicans.  It’d be nice to see him go after Clinton or Obama as tenaciously as he’s gone after Jeb Bush.  Jeb Bush probably deserves it, but Clinton and Obama deserve it even moreso.

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And finally, despite being a eulogy, still a story of the success a heroic aviator:

BALTIMORE — Frank E. Petersen Jr., the first black aviator and brigadier general in the Marine Corps, has died.

Frank E. Petersen III said his father died Tuesday at his home in Stevensville, on Maryland’s Kent Island, of complications from lung cancer. He was 83. …

According to a news release on the Marine Corps website, Petersen was commissioned in the Corps in 1952. The Marines say Petersen served in the Korean War in 1953 and Vietnam in 1968. He received the Purple Heart for wounds suffered when he ejected over the demilitarized zone in Vietnam, The Post reported.

During his career, Petersen flew more than 350 combat missions and more than 4,000 hours.

He, Roy Geiger and Alfred A. Cunningham are probably having a few beers and swapping stories now.

Field Day: Flagging Confederates

This stuff all went crazy in the last couple weeks, culminating with the Confederate flag in front of the Confederate memorial in front of the South Carolina capitol being taken down.

Of course, before that happened, the Confederate flag and any flags related to the Confederacy were taken down… at Fort Sumter.

The flags of the Confederacy that flew high over Fort Sumter, the site where the first shots of the Civil War were fired, have been taken down from the historic site.

The decision to remove the flags came from a directive by National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis in Washington, D.C. which reads: “Confederate flags shall not be flown in units of the National Park system and related sites with the exception of specific circumstances where the flags provide historic context. … All superintendents and program managers should evaluate how Confederate flags are used … and remove the flags where appropriate.” “Shall not be flown” is the only text that appears in bold in the letter.

The site of the Civil War’s first battle is clearly a “historic” one, but according to a Fort Sumter spokesperson, it doesn’t qualify as a place where “flags provide historical context,” local WMBF News reported.

Keep in mind again that’s where the war between the states started.

Meanwhile, in Memphis, suggestions were made to dig up confederate soldier corpses and presumably drag them down the street on fire before hanging them from bridge supports.  New Orleans radicals just want to tear down all the memorials in New Orleans and get rid of the fleur-de-lis.

Flag makers aren’t going to make Confederate flags anymore.

Golfer, idiot and coward Bubba Watson has stated he’s going to paint over the original Dukes of Hazzard General Lee car’s flag.

And people are calling the police when they see Confederate flags for sale.

A shopper perusing the merchandise at the Redwood Country Flea Market was so offended by a vendor selling Confederate and Nazi historical memorabilia, the person actually called 911.

Wallingford, Connecticut police were dispatched to the flea market to investigate.

The police chief William Wright tells News 8 “the reason no one was arrested was because the items were being sold on private property” — not to mention no laws were broken.

The caller demanding the police crush someone for the sake of their hurt feelings and burn some items they don’t like whimpers that they were “shaking and almost vomiting”.  And the natural result of someone who’s offended by memorabilia from a police state that ruled based on whims of tyrant’s feelings is to… call the police and demand they enforce a law based on whims of their own feelings.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
– George Orwell, 1984

Jazz Shaw at HotAir had this (and much more) to say at the end of the flag (and flagpole) tearing-down.

The flag flew on battlefields, it’s true. And there have been some hateful folk in more recent generations who chose to adopt it to their cause. But there were many others at various times who found a different meaning. There are families who pass down memories of not only the war, but of the crushing treatment the South received in the post–Reconstruction era and the postbellum South during the late nineteenth century. Traveling in time well beyond that, many of today’s families still feel the frequent reminders of the defeat. They understand that “The South” is still the safe harbor for comedians on stage and at the local bar… the butt of the last offensive jokes which can be told without fear of censorship. The stupid, southern rednecks who listen to unpopular music, go to NASCAR races, gig frogs, wrestle gators or whatever other stereotype you wish to apply. They speak more slowly. They have funny accents. And you can treat them like lesser people without fear of the SJW coming down on your heads. They’re just southerners… they don’t know any better.

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And Jonah Goldberg pointed out that in contrast to the left’s vitriol against all things Southern, Charleston responded with dignity.

“Lots of folks expected us to do something strange and break out in a riot. Well, they just don’t know us,” the Reverend Norvel Goff told the packed, multiracial congregation of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., on Sunday. It was the first service since the horrific slaughter of nine innocent souls by a racist fanatic.

…

Less shocking, but almost as uplifting, was the conduct of the broader Charleston community, which has been unified and dignified, despite the expectations of some in the media — and the accused gunman, who had singled out Charleston because of its success at racial integration.

Not a lot of talk about the people who were hurt, the people who were killed, or how the community was harmed and how the community has responded, just SJWs exploiting a tragedy to push social change and do a little cultural cleansing of a group they feel they need to eradicate.

What the Confederate Flag Freakout Tells Us About the Left

Both HotAir and Twitchy have really good links and info on the crazy reaction.  The short short version is that eBay, Amazon, etsy and Walmart have all pulled any and all merchandise with the Confederate Flag on it in some kind of crazed knee-jerk response to a murderer having some interest in the flag.

I’m not from the Old South, so I’m not particularly attached to the flag.  It holds no personal meaning for me, but it is a historical symbol.  Some folks are attached to it for personal reasons – like Byron Thomas, whose ancestors fought for the south and despite having been slaves, were compensated by the state.  It’s not part of my heritage, but it is still part of American heritage.

When I was stationed in NC for a while, I visited some Civil War sites, talked with some reenactors, and frankly they’re the only ones I see getting hurt in this.  They do living history and play dress-up, and now they’re suddenly terrorist racists or something.

It is telling to see handwringing by both leftists and the big city right worrying about “a creepy underground market” and driving a symbol underground to make it a martyr’s mark or something, where they’re all worried not that their spastic eradication and witch hunt is insane, but that there might still be some hardcore hate-driven hate-hate people who bond around a flag.  Because of course they don’t know any reenactors, and only know what their bubble tells them about that flag.

The folks ostensibly on the right asking “why do these places still sell Nazi and Communist memorabilia” are hopefully trying to point out a double standard, but risk getting even more things banned.  Frankly, if someone wants a bust of Stalin (20,000,000 murders to his credit) or a copy of Mao’s little red book (65,000,000 murders), it’s telling of the owner, whether they’re a historian, history buff, or Communist.  And if you want to dress like a Nazi, maybe you’re an apt pupil, or maybe you’re part of a theater company doing a version of The Producers, or you’re a WWII reenactor (yes, they exist).

The character of a person is not changed by obliterating a flag from existence.  But the character of the people demanding eradication is often made quite clear.

Stephen Miller hits on the real lesson to take from this (via Twitchy):

In three days it went from “let’s take down the flag in historic capitals because we don’t really need it there anymore” to “burn it all”.

Slippery slope?  Nope, just the left getting people to agree with them and do their bidding.  If it does not conform, it must be obliterated.

Also, the Confederate Battle Flag belongs on the General Lee… which is being stripped of the flag.

As a MOPAR guy, that’s offensive.  It’s also yet another reminder that the objective of the left is to utterly obliterate anything they disagree with.  It must all be destroyed.

Update: And now Google’s going to do its part to delete the Confederate flag from existence.