Who funds Antifa?

 

Andy Ngo is senior editor at The Post Millennial and author of the NYT bestseller, Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. Earlier this week at the NY Post, he reported on the radical organization Antifa’s funding sources:

Last week, the city of Philadelphia agreed to pay $9.25 million to 343 left-wing protesters who alleged they suffered “physical and emotional injuries” when police used tear gas and pepper spray to clear them off a major highway in downtown at a Black Lives Matter-style direct action in 2020.

Videos recorded at the time showed the mob shut down the highway while vandalizing public property. 

As a journalist who reports on the militant far-left and its rioters, the question I’m asked most often is, “Who funds them?”

Some believe billionaire George Soros is responsible.

And they would be partially correct. Soros funds groups that form part of the support apparatus of left-wing militants — district attorneys, biased media and legal groups.

But his money doesn’t directly reach the pockets of militants on the street.

Who ends up paying far-left rioters like Antifa? Too often, taxpayers like you and me.

Through a developed network of radical leftist legal groups, like the National Lawyers Guild, lawfare against cities and police departments is the go-to method for payloads. . . .

Here’s the really ugly part:

. . . Nearly every American city afflicted by mass protesting and rioting in 2020 ended up settling and paying out millions in taxpayer money to radical protesters who were allegedly subjected to force by law enforcement. . . .

Read the rest here. 

 # # #

Neil Oliver: The era of ‘Great Pretending’

 

Image credit: peterjnorth.blogspot.com

Sundance introduces Neil Oliver’s latest monologue/meditation:

In this monologue Oliver uses two of my favorite metaphors to describe modern western civilization.  First, the Potemkin Villages constructed by political elite in their effort to make it seem like the world is something it is not. Second, the great pretending that is needed in order to sell it.

Here’s part of the transcript:

[T]he term Potemkin village has stuck and is still used today to describe the lengths to which the leaders of a failing, broken country might go in order to create the illusion of success and prosperity when the truth is altogether different.

. . .

We are no longer policed by consent. Rather the police force and it is a force now, in lieu of a service, has been bent around political or ideological will. Some protest groups are deemed good – Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, Black Lives Matter and fed tea and biscuits while they block the roads and smash windows, protected from any and all opposing views.

Others espousing opinions that fly in the face of the latest ideological kink or political dikta protests about so-called vaccines, or about lockdown or illegal immigration, often prompt the unleashing of the men on horseback, the riot shields.

Mountains of data reveal that the products marketed as vaccines are no such thing. They don’t stop infection. They don’t stop transmission. They don’t stop an infected person getting sick. They don’t keep an infected person out of hospital. And they don’t stop an infected person dying.

By any measure those products, released under emergency use authorization and demonstrably the cause of countless deaths and injuries, are, at best, a façade, a front, an optical illusion intended to make the masses move in the direction desired by the leaders.

Whatever way you cut it, those products don’t work as advertised and yet still the advertising-slash-propaganda campaigns are up and running – right now, this very minute – pushing needles into as many arms as possible, including those of healthy 6-month-old babies.

. . .

The Green agenda is not about Green, rather it is about Greed. There’s even fake meat, and fake milk, and fake cheese and scores of other fake food products besides. What else would you serve in a Potemkin village, after all, but fake food?

. . .

While more and more of the population wakes up to the lies, obfuscation, fear-porn and propaganda around the so-called vaccines, around the Green agenda, around gender politics and race politics. The majority of the news media obediently pumps out the same old tosh about “safe and effective” and “climate crisis” and “preferred pronouns” and race baiting.

But the fakery has been swiftly and shoddily constructed, without the foundation of truth. For that reason, this Potemkin village thrown up around us is flimsy and should be easily demolished, if we wish it so.  . . .

Mr. Oliver is describing Great Britain, but as many reader comments point out, it’s all happening in America as well.  The full transcript, or, if you prefer, the video, is at Conservative Treehouse here.

# # #

Corruption at the FBI: It’s systemic.

 

Michael Ramirez cartoon via WashingtonTimes.com

Eric Lendrum at American Greatness reports:

According to the Post Millennial, the multiple agents from the D.C. field office who could be seen kneeling before rioters on June 4th, 2022, were each given $100 gift cards by the FBI Agents Association (FBIAA). This was reported by retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent James Gagliano, who wrote in the New York Post that this revelation was “shocking and appalling on its face.”

“Looked at in a larger context,” Gagliano continued, “this disgusting decision proves the rot and decay at the FBI is not singularly the domain of some senior officials.”

The incident involved a team of armed agents wearing FBI vests, who had been designed as a “presence patrol” to guard the National Archives and Supreme Court as riots raged across D.C., with many buildings being set on fire by the rioters.

When rioters noticed the FBI agents and began reacting with hostility, at least seven of the agents took a knee – a gesture that has come to be recognized as an act of disrespect towards the United States, which has been used most often by black nationalists. In addition, a senior counterterrorism special agent hugged some of the rioters. FBI management defended this display as an act of “de-escalation,” and thus rewarded every agent with gift cards of “modest value.”

“During my 25-year career, I was privileged and honored to work alongside FBI agents who killed or captured Top Ten fugitives and violent, dangerous, murderous felons,” Gagliano wrote. “To my knowledge, not one of these actual heroes received an FBIAA gift card of ‘modest value.’”

“I have come to grips with the fact that my beloved FBI has been irreparably broken by woke activists serving amongst its senior ranks,” the former special agent added. “And with the Justice Department appearing to do this president’s bidding by targeting his political adversaries, it will take a monumental house-cleaning and seismic shift in culture at both the DOJ and the FBI to begin to restore America’s trust and confidence.” . . .

Shut it down.  And read the rest of the report here.

# # #

IRS: Internal Radical Service

 

The great David Horowitz and his colleague John Perazzo have a new pamphlet just out and you can access it for free online.  Here’s Mr Horowitz’s introduction:

How the IRS abuses taxpayer dollars to advance leftwing causes
illegally and unconstitutionally

On August 7, the Democrats passed a bill that authorizes a ten-year, $80 billion hike in federal funding for the Internal Revenue Service, which will make it possible for the IRS to hire 87,000 new agents and will make it larger than the Pentagon, the State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined.

The IRS has already been weaponized as a national federal police force to harass, punish and obstruct conservative and religious organizations. Under President Obama, the IRS blocked the efforts of hundreds of Tea Party and other conservative groups to apply for tax-exempt status. The objective was to prevent those groups – and the millions of voters whom they might potentially have influenced – from having a voice in our democracy.

But this persecution of conservatives is only half the story. Over the years, the IRS has allowed hundreds of billions of tax-payer dollars to fund left-wing tax-exempt foundations violating its own rules, while denying conservative foundations the same access. This has had the effect of creating a lobby within the Democrat Party that has transformed it into a radical force bent on “fundamentally transforming the United States of America."

The IRS violations include providing taxpayer subsidies to Democrat election campaigns; to underwriting Black Lives Matter riots which caused billions of dollars in property damage and led to the deaths of scores of individuals; the Internal Revenue Code's explicit requirement that all charitable activities should “promote the public good”; and the funding of racist policies which violate the Civil Rights Act and the Constitution.

This booklet -- Internal Radical Service -- documents these violations and their destructive consequences. We publish it now as an appeal to Congress to investigate the abuses, and restore the integrity of an organization which has become a major threat to our democracy.

Click on the link here for access to the pamphlet. 

# # #

Cracked Icons of the Left

 

Image credit:  Legal Insurrection

The inimitable Victor Davis Hanson provides a glimmer of hope in his American Greatness piece “Cracked Icons: The Corrupt and Mediocre Heroes of the Left are Imploding”:

With fits and starts, we are slowly returning to reality after four years of mass hysteria. Our media-deified, progressive icons are finally being exposed as the deceivers they always were.

. . .

He closes with “Basement Biden”:

Do we remember old Joe Biden from Scranton? He was the media fiction who hid his dementia in his basement for a year, spouting that Trump had wrecked everything and he would bring about decency, prosperity, an end to the virus, and “healing.” 

The Biden candidacy was one of the most cynical in American history. The unhinged far-Left adopted a befuddled Biden as the respectable veneer necessary to see their hard-core, but stealth socialist agenda finally enacted. Key to a virtual presidency would be virtual voting, as 102 million mail-in and early votes were never subject to the previous standards of authentication and statistical rejection rates of the past—rendering Election Day voting mostly a memory.

Good Joe was billed as the antithesis to the tweeting Bad Trump. Yet he clearly wasn’t. Even Joe’s tweets (e.g., “We are with you, Jussie”) were often more ridiculous.

Within days the “moderate” Joe Biden set in place policies that were guaranteed to begin wrecking the country, to send his polls down into the 30s, to ensure the likely wipe-out of his congressional majorities in 2022, and to make himself and the media who created his myth disliked, and the laughingstock of the country. Trump became unpopular when over 90 percent of media coverage was negative, and the Left concocted a never-ending circus of hoaxes, starting with Russian collusion; but Biden is disliked, despite an obsequious media and weaponized bureaucracies on his side.

We are in the first 10 months of a cognitively challenged president who is deteriorating geometrically not arithmetically, with a vice president in waiting whom the nation fears is more dangerous, even knowing Biden is half-senile. He may be reaching the point of embarrassment at which the media and Left no longer find him useful and begin leaking and staging his exit.

Single-handedly the Biden puppeteers have managed to restore the Trump record of achievement simply by doing the opposite of what Trump did, thereby ensuring their own failure and reminding voters of what once was working. 

Biden may end up with the most unrecognized achievement of the modern age: the radical transformation of leftwing Latinos into a conservative majority of fed-up voters—a development that will likely cause the Left to demand an end to open borders on the assumption too many Mexicans and Central Americans are ending up like wizened Cuban and Venezuelan immigrants.

We could add other fallen heroes of the Left who once saturated our recent air waves—Robert Mueller and his dream team that would rid the world of Trump, and the quartet of John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe. They, by their dishonesty, prevarications, and careerism have almost single-handedly tarnished the reputations of the Washington-based intelligence and investigatory agencies. Yet now, the Left has no more need of them. They are already fading from the public awareness, as careerists who managed to erode support from all those who once most readily defended their own institutions.

The lesson of these fallen icons? 

They were deified for larger reductionist and anti-Trump agendas. Yet they were also always dispensable when their utility eroded, due to their mediocrity—of such a magnitude that even our American Pravdas could no longer continue to manipulate them for advantage.

Hanson further expands on “icons” Jussie Smollet, the Cuomo brothers, Kamala Harris, Adam Schiff, and BLM.  I hope he’s right (he usually is).  Full column is here.

# # #

David Horowitz’s "I Can’t Breathe"

At FrontPageMag.com, Mark Tapson  reviews David Horowitz’s new book I Can’t Breathe, a book that takes a deep dive into the Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization. "The self-proclaimed trained Marxists who founded that subversive movement exploited, and continue to exploit, [26 black] victims in order to incite a civil war in America by hyping a false narrative of the systematic targeting of blacks by law enforcement.”  

I have not yet read Mr. Horowitz's book, but Mr. Tapson’s review provides solid information on the many race hoaxes and propaganda that are tearing apart America’s social fabric.  Here’s part of the review:

Horowitz’s aim with the book is to puncture BLM’s grotesque narrative, which is supported by the Democrat Party and amplified by its media enablers. He begins the book with a summary of our current racial divide, which was exacerbated by deadly, nationwide BLM rioting – “a summer of insurrections” – in 2020 that constituted “the costliest sustained acts of civil disorder in American history.” The siege of Portland by violent leftist activists, the Democrat movement to defund police departments and the subsequent crime waves that swept the nation, the anti-American messaging, the 2016 massacre of five white cops in Dallas at the hands of a BLM-inspired black extremist – Horowitz weaves all these ugly threads and more to create a dark tapestry of the devastation that Black Lives Matter’s myth-making has wrought:

The casualties of the scorched-earth war unleashed by Black Lives Matter dwarf the total casualties of all the alleged racial injustices the organization has protested. The atrocities instigated and inspired by BLM encompass scores of innocent wounded and dead, both black and white… Surveying these disasters, one could reasonably conclude that, thanks to Black Lives Matter campaigns to abolish police departments, advances in both race relations and protections for urban black communities have been set back fifty years.

Horowitz compiles the names of 26 black victims BLM claims were murdered or maimed by the police since the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 sparked the launch of the movement. They include the aforementioned Martin, Floyd and Taylor, as well as Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Race, and Freddie Gray, to name some of the most well-known. Then – in chapters on how the BLM movement began, grew, and went national and then international – Horowitz goes on to dissect all 26 incidents according to the facts, backed up by over 70 pages of endnotes. He demonstrates how BLM has lied about every single one in its quest to aggravate racial tensions and rip America apart at the seams. . . .

The full review is here.  Highly recommended.

# # #

Ministry of Fear

 

Michael Walsh explores America's future in this essay at The Epoch Times.  He is not optimistic.  Here are his concluding thoughts:

Instilled Fear

Worse is the now-instilled fear of others; the justifiable fear of the anarchy in the streets unleashed by Black Lives Matter, Antifa, the knockout game, the assault on Asian-Americans, and other random acts of street violence no longer reined in by now-defunded police forces around the country.

Fear of further arbitrary and unconstitutional lockdowns, mask “mandates” of dubious or non-existent legal authority, and a thousand other trivial miseries that collectively add up to the very definition of tyranny, including “cancel culture,” speech police, and “woke” institutions and corporations that seek to impose crackpot notions of sex and sexuality on a population now too cowed and enfeebled to resist and fight back.

In the name of “health,” we are experiencing a monstrous evil, every bit as pernicious as the twin totalitarian catastrophes of National Socialist Germany and communist Russia during the last century—evils only finally suppressed at great cost in lives and treasure.

With the current unholy alliance between the Democrats and “woke” big businesses, what we are seeing is something akin to Italian fascism under Mussolini, in which the captains of industry (very much including social media, which at this point needs to be destroyed) work hand-in-glove with Washington in order to impose such things as speech codes and overt censorship that government alone cannot do.

How else could someone like Bill de Blasio—aka Warren Wilhelm, Jr., the socialist mayor of New York City—get away with his recent decree that patrons of restaurants, gyms, and cultural events must show proof of vaccination in order to gain entry? But rule-by-decree is now the norm in blue states such as New York and California, something unthinkable just two years ago.

Worse, we are finding it almost impossible to effectively combat. When the John Roberts Supreme Court failed the nation by refusing to hear the state of Texas’s lawsuit challenging the election, it signaled that it didn’t have the belly for a fight, no matter what the stakes, or how clearly the Constitution itself spelled out the court’s jurisdiction under Article 3, which states in Section 2 that “the judicial power shall extend to… to controversies between two or more states; between a state and citizens of another state.”

With its abdication, the Roberts Court—surely the worst since the heyday of Earl Warren, if only by its utter passivity in the face of the threat to our republican democracy—indicated that the American people were henceforth on their own, and ushered in the age of our very own Ministry of Fear. Unless it is smashed, its reign is likely to last a long time.

The full article is here.  And it’s not pretty.

# # #

Sports Illustrated goes “woke”

 

Eric Utter published a piece about Sports Illustrated over the weekend at American Thinker.  I am not much of a sports fan, but his opening paragraphs offer a good summary of the cultural decline in America.  And his article is a good follow-up to my blog yesterday on the future of arts communities – if there is a future.  Mr. Utter begins:

The Left ruins everything. Television. Movies. Economies. Cities. Lives. Religion. Comedy. Sports. Everything. Literally everything.

It does so in many insidious ways. It divides us with multiculturalism and critical race theory. It makes some groups bitter, envious, and indolent by telling them they are victims of other groups’ bigotry…and that there is nothing any of the groups can do about it. It revises history, changes language, and restricts speech, all in an effort to restrict thought. It brandishes “wokeism” as a weapon and “cancels” those it dislikes. All of this has led to a more ignorant—and less fun—America.

The left has recently rendered sports less a form of entertainment that can bring all of us together and more of a vehicle to lecture and hector fans, in an attempt to hammer them into strict conformity of thought. We have all seen this with anthem protests, BLM messages, boycotts, etc., etc.

And now, even a once nearly-revered sports publication, Sports Illustrated, has completely given in to the mendacious minority mob that demands all things be seen exclusively through the prism of race/class/gender/politics. Sports Illustrated, like nearly all mainstream media, has leaned left for many years but has just recently completely abandoned all balance and objectivity in an apparently desperate—if puzzling­—attempt at virtue-signaling.

. . .

Mr. Utter then goes into specifics based on the latest issue.  Read the rest of Mr. Utter’s piece here.

# # #

The Tyrants Among Us

The Editorial Board at Issues and Insights gives us fair warning on returning to normalcy:

 Of course they’re not going to let a crisis go to waste.

   . . . 

There’s a natural progression from the pandemic lockdowns to restrictions on freedom in the name of saving the sky from global warming. But the tyrants among us won’t stop there. We find it useful here to quote the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s international affairs analyst, who realized more than six months ago that “the virus of tyranny has already found itself in the bloodstream of liberal democracies.”

For instance:

• President Joe Biden and his party hope to saddle Americans, through undisciplined spending, with debt and a de facto tax (inflation) that can be repaid only by mortgaging the future and bondage to the federal monster.
• There is a core on the left, not even the hard left, that is resisting a return to normal. It wants liberty-shackling rules in place in perpetuity.
• Our freedom to speak will continue to be abridged.
• Our ability to make independent and individual health care decisions will be curtailed further.
• Second Amendment rights will be in danger of being rolled back because of “public health” needs.
• Expect to be forced out of our fossil-fuel-burning automobiles and herded into mass transit.
• Protests and rallies will be put down as insurrections – unless they are in service of the “right” groups, such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

Once lost, freedom is difficult to regain. “Be warned,” says author Michael Walsh. “If you think the petty tyrants currently making your lives miserable are going to willingly relinquish their illicit powers, think again. They’ve got a taste for it now.”

So intoxicated from their deep swig of power are they that they no longer see boundaries, just opportunities to subjugate. Fight back, or lose in a few years what has made America unique and great for more than two centuries

The entire editorial is here.

# # #

David Horowitz's The Enemy Within

 

David Horowitz is a recovering red-diaper baby;  his background is here.  Today on FrontPage, Jason D. Hill reviews Mr. Horowitz’s latest book:

. . .  David Horowitz has identified the nature of that second virus. I think that he reasons that it is deadlier than COVID-19, and that its deleterious consequences are far more destructive and long-lasting than any biological infection.

… This latest book, The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America, Horowitz locates the political ideology destroying every democratic and Enlightenment value on which our constitutional republic was founded. The invasive virus identified by Horowitz is a left-wing reactionary politics ensconced within the Democratic Party.

The philosophical root of this ideology which ties it to several movements that suffuse our culture, whether it be radical feminism, Black Lives Matter, Islamic Jihadism, the equity movements, reparation movements, the trial by media of Justice Brett Kavanaugh or, what Horowitz describes as the racist anti-racist rhetoric of Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nahesi Coates, is: “Identity Politics.”

Horowitz defines it as a radical ideology that is “racial and collectivist, and that privileges groups over individuals and demonized those who fall on the wrong side of its social equation. As a worldview Identity Politics is fundamentally at odds with America’s core principles of individual freedom, accountability, and equality, which have been the foundation of the nation’s progress for more than two hundred years.”

. . .

The rest of this article is here.  Mr. Horowitz was a guest on OAN's Tipping Point this evening. He is always outstanding. 

# # #

 

Black Lives Matter’s Corporate Funding

 

Jay Greenberg at Neonnettle reports:

Black Lives Matter Is Funded by These 18 Corporations

The main Black Lives Matter organization, founded by “trained Marxists,” calls for replacing the nuclear family with a “village,” and abolishing police, prisons, and law courts.  

Despite the extreme goals of BLM, some of America’s largest corporations have pledged or donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the far-left group.

Prominent brands, including Amazon, Microsoft, Nabisco, Gatorade, Airbnb, and the Atlantic and Warner record labels, have helped to fund the organization with massive donations.

. . .

For more details and the rest of the report, click here.  More reasons to not drink Gatorade, etc.

# # #

David Horowitz on “Where We Are”

 

David Horowitz of Freedom Center posted an article today on FrontPageMagazine titled “Where We Are and What We are Facing.” He was raised in a Communist family and figured out as a young man that the Communist party was pure evil;  he analyzes today’s crises through that lens.  Here is an extract:

The “social justice” radicals still have the best slogans. They call themselves progressives but are actually reactionaries. They call themselves liberals but are actually bigots. They say they’re for peace when they are organized for war. It is always the same war: to bring down the United States of America.

Thanks mainly to their growing influence, we live in extreme times, where things are not what they are made to seem, and monstrous accusations are leveled at individuals without restraint. As a result, we live in an atmosphere of intimidation, where people can lose their livelihoods, their careers and even their lives if they get on the wrong side of leftist crusaders. That is a terrible thing to have to say in this once free country, but it is something that has become too obvious to deny.

. . .

Forty years ago, I left the left when I saw that it was a destructive force that would never change. Leftists do not tolerate dissenters in their ranks. They suppress politically incorrect ideas and cast out their perpetrators, demonizing them in the process. As a result, leftists never learn from their “mistakes” or take responsibility for their crimes. Thus, in every generation a new destructive crusade for “social justice” is launched, oblivious of the disasters previous radical campaigns left in their wakes.

The leaders of Black Lives Matter proclaim “We are trained Marxists,” as though that were a badge of honor rather than a confession of dangerous ignorance and a kiss of death. Every successful Marxist revolution without exception has established a ruthless police state, which more often than not conducts genocidal persecutions of ethnic minorities. In other words, social injustice on an epic scale. Yet that is the prospect we face in a reactionary left that has learned nothing from the past and is intent on destroying the most tolerant, inclusive, egalitarian society ever created. The good news is that a patriotic movement has risen, rededicated to the propositions that all men are created equal and endowed with God-given rights to life and liberty, and is prepared to defend them.

The full article is here.  

# # #

The Hodge Twins on Cannon Hinnant

 The Hodge Twins post topical videos all the time on YouTube.  They are informative and funny.  This one (7:16 minutes) is on the more serious side, as they are commenting on the shooting of Cannon Hinnant.  However, considering the daily deluge of Black Lives Matter propaganda, they are also showing the bias and corruption in the media.

 # # #

Woke vs. awoken

photo credit: foxnews

From guest blogger Pat:

Leo Terrell was woke but now he has awoken. He's not alone.

People are seeing the destruction wrought on major American cities by looters and rioters, led by Antifa shock troops armed with hammers, bear spray, blinding lasers, commercial fireworks, Molotov cocktails, and more while protected by shields, helmets, industrial quality gas masks and the ability to blend into a larger crowd of BLM protesters for protection. 

The MSM [mainstream media] support Antifa and BLM and hide from public view the violence committed by those radical groups. When Rep. Jim Jordan showed a video of the violence at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in Congress, the MSM cut away. The head of the Committee, one Jerrold Nadler, flat out denied that the protests were anything but peaceful.

But, the MSM no longer has a monopoly on the news. Citizen journalists, bloggers, talk radio and even local TV channels are reporting on the destruction, which largely impacts poorer neighborhoods. The locals are figuring out that the white Antifa radicals that attacked their local supermarket, drugstore and police precinct are not fighting to improve their lives. Nor are the mobs that follow, under the umbrella of BLM, that loot and destroy these neighborhood foundations. 

BLM, Antifa and the MSM may be the woke darlings of today's Democrat party but they have awoken a silent coalition of all races and creeds that rejects divisive rhetoric and violence and wants a civil society restored. Despite the best efforts of the woke tech giants, it will be restored on November 4th, 2020.

# # #

Heather Mac Donald on government failures: lockdowns and riots

                       

One of our free subscriptions is to Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.  In the latest issue, Heather Mac Donald just published “Four Months of Unprecedented Government Malfeasance” and it is now available online.  She is addressing the unnecessary and arbitrary shutdown due to COVID-19, as well as the passive, not to say complicit, government role with the Black Lives Matter-fueled rioting. 

Over the last four months, Americans have lived through what is arguably the most consequential period of government malfeasance in U.S. history. Public officials’ overreaction to the novel coronavirus put American cities into a coma; those same officials’ passivity in the face of widespread rioting threatens to deliver the coup de grâce. Together, these back-to-back governmental failures will transform the American polity and cripple urban life for decades.

Before store windows started shattering in the name of racial justice, urban existence was already on life support, thanks to the coronavirus lockdowns. Small businesses—the restaurants and shops that are the lifeblood of cities—were shuttered, many for good, leaving desolate rows of “For Rent” signs on street after street in New York City and elsewhere. Americans huddled in their homes for months on end, believing that if they went outside, death awaited them.

This panic was occasioned by epidemiological models predicting wildly unlikely fatalities from the coronavirus.

On March 30, the infamous Imperial College London model predicted 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. by September 1, absent government action. That prediction was absurd on its face, given the dispersal of the U.S. population and the fact that China’s coronavirus death toll had already levelled off at a few thousand. The authors of that study soon revised it radically downwards.

Too late. It had already become the basis for the exercise of unprecedented government power. California was the first state to lock down its economy and confine its citizens to their homes; eventually almost every other state would follow suit, under enormous media pressure to do so.

Never before had public officials required millions of lawful businesses to shut their doors, throwing tens of millions of people out of work. They did so at the command of one particular group of experts—those in the medical and public health fields—who viewed their mandate as eliminating one particular health risk with every means put at their disposal.

If the politicians who followed their advice weighed a greater set of considerations, balancing the potential harm from the virus against the harm from the shutdowns, they showed no sign of it. Instead, governors and mayors started rolling out one emergency decree after another to terminate economic activity, seemingly heedless of the consequences.

. . .

The full essay is here.  [Note: my only criticism of MacDonald’s essay is that she implies that the behavior of the police officer who restrained George Floyd was “grotesquely callous and contrary to sound tactics.” However, based on the police complaint, the medical examiner’s report with toxicology report, and reasonable analysis by Clarice Feldman, Floyd died of a heart attack while in police custody; the neck restraint was consistent with police training in Minneapolis when an officer is trying to prevent a suspect exhibiting drug-related “excited delirium syndrome” from inflicting injury on himself.]

# # #

Every Sports Team Must Change Its Name

Daniel Greenfield’s article “Every Sports Team Must Change Its Name” highlights the insanity of this craze to re-name sports teams.  And of course it won’t stop with sports teams.  Mr. Greenfield begins:

Every name is racist. Every name must change.

The Washington Redskins agreed to change a name that offended no one except white leftists, but the media, which always speaks with forked tongue, is demanding more sports scalps.

The Cleveland Indians have issued a statement whining that "the recent social unrest... has only underscored the need for us to keep improving as an organization on issues of social justice."

Remember when the Indians were just known for being cursed with the second-longest championship drought in sports, now they can be cursed for their commitment to social justice.

The curse used to be known as the Curse of Chief Wahoo, but he's already been purged for political incorrectness. And now the Indians announced that they're "committed to engaging our community and appropriate stakeholders to determine the best path forward with regard to our team name.” Those stakeholders won't be their fans or anyone who knows what baseball is.

. . .

Some media editorialist will, eventually, link the Cleveland Cavaliers to the Southern cavalier mythos and accuse them of white supremacy. The English Civil War would seem to have little to do with a Cleveland team, but King Charles I was involved in the African slave trade.

“The name Cleveland Cavaliers represents a group of daring fearless men, whose life's pact was never surrender, no matter what the odds,” the fan who won a contest to name the team wrote.

We’ll see how long that lasts.

. . .

The simplest solution might be for every team to change its name to Black Lives Matter.

And when the Pittsburgh Heinz Black Lives Matters play the New York MetLife Black Lives Matters, it’ll be a little bit confusing, but that’s okay because no one will be watching.

Read the full article here.

# # #

Destroying our heroes and culture: coming to Cleveland

photo credit from Portland: pamplinmedia

Daniel Greenfield is an associate of David Horowitz at the Freedom Center, and he blogs at Sultan Knish.  Several days ago, he posted a sobering essay, “Here Are the Heroes Whose Statues Black Lives Matter Has Attacked,” about the destruction and defacement of monuments.  Highly recommended, pretty upsetting, but a must-read. Here are a few extracts:

The statue of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, stands at the corner of Fairfax and Beverly in Los Angeles. When the racist mobs swept through the area, looting Jewish stores and defacing synagogues with "BLM" and "Free Palestine" graffiti, the statue of a man who risked his life to resist fascism and bigotry was one of their targets.

The racists and leftists vandalizing statues across the world claim that they’re fighting hate, but their targets have often been the men and women who courageously stood up to racism and hatred.

. . .

In Washington D.C., the Lincoln Memorial and the National WW2 Memorial were both defaced. This is not the work of anti-racists, but of racists. It’s not the work of anti-fascists, but of fascists.

While the media has upheld the racist narrative justifying the Taliban campaign against America by focusing on confederate memorials, the vandalism has been extensive, targeting both sides in the Civil War, and spilling over to vandalize statues that have absolutely no relevance to contemporary politics.

. . .

As every statue falls, is defiled, and disgraced, a part of America dies. When Democrats and even Republicans collude in the desecration and stand aside for the mob, a part of America dies.

The soul of a nation lies with its heroes. The radicals and racists tearing down our statues are out to destroy that soul. They want our heroes to be Karl Marx and Angela Davis, they want terrorists, totalitarians and criminals celebrated, and heroes, explorers, founders, officers and soldiers condemned.

They aren’t just coming for the “controversial” statues as the media likes to tell us.

They are coming for all the statues, for our entire history, for every great man and woman who sacrificed, strove, and struggled to move the course of human history forward by even one inch.

They are coming for America. And they intend to destroy it, one statue and one city after another.

When the history of this period is written, we will learn whether we had any heroes in our time.

Mr. Greenfield full article is here.

The Cuyahoga County Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument honors Civil War soldiers and sailors from Cleveland and Cuyahoga County.  It is located at Public Square. And it was defaced during the recent riots.  

How much longer before it is destroyed? 

To make matters even worse, Cuyahoga County is considering “declaring racism a public health crisis.” This blog already reported that Cleveland Council unanimously approved a ‘Black Lives Matter’ mural outside City Hall   All this support for an organization that is utterly destructive to our way of life.

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The Summer of Our Gaslighting Discontent

Overwhelmed by the riots, statue-toppling, and other manifestations of insanity? Brian Cates at UncoverDC expects we are in for 4½ months of more of the same. But there is a brighter side to all this. His article “The Summer of Our Gaslighting Discontent” begins:

I’ve got some bad news for you, folks. To get to that massive Trump landslide in November, we’re going to have to go through an ordeal because there will be a relentless and almost overwhelming amount of gaslighting until the election gets here.

A massive amount of time, effort and money will be invested by the Progressive Left to hide the real cultural shift going on in this country, as they use the legacy media to try to manufacture a fake cultural shift in the other direction.

Confederate statues were the start, now in less than two weeks the mob has moved on to founding father Thomas Jefferson and President Abraham Lincoln.

. . .

Mr. Cates concludes:

So keep this truth in mind the next 4½ months as you watch many prominent celebrities, newscasters, sports stars, musicians, and major companies all endlessly babbling about this awesome cool cultural shift away from America’s systemic racism [and Donald Trump!] to Marxist Social Justice and Joe Biden.

Well, let them babble. This 2020 election is not the referendum on America’s Systemic Racist Past as the gaslighters are so desperate to frame it.

It’s about a return to SANITY. That’s what most Americans will demand, and the elections results will demonstrate that.

Mr. Cates’s column is here. (And I hope he’s right.)

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Cleveland City Council bows down

Cleveland Tea Party’s Ralph King shared a link and comment:

Council unanimously approves‘Black Lives Matter’ mural outside City Hall 

So I guess no other lives matter... 

An unveiling ceremony will take place on Juneteenth at 2 p.m.

[An earlier Cleveland Tea Party blog on David Horowitz's eye-opening essay on the mission and background of Black Lives Matter is here.]

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David Horowitz on the wolf in sheep's clothing

David Horowitz

Many of my relatives and friends are in a state of alarm over George Floyd’s death.  They are sufficiently upset to voice their support for Black Lives Matter, even though nobody knows if race was a motive in police officer Derek Chauvin’s knee-on-neck restraint.  Nevertheless, Black Lives Matter and its offshoots are employing aggressive tactics to increase the scope of their influence.  

But nothing is at it seems.  A go-to source on the history of Black Lives Matter and its core mission is David Horowitz.  He posted on the subject recently at FrontPage Magazine.  Highly recommended if you know anyone who is attracted to Black Lives Matter out of guilt or sympathy or a misunderstanding.  Here’s a short extract (numbers in brackets indicate a footnote in the article):

The power of Black Lives Matter stemmed from its exploitation of the ideology of oppression – Identity Politics – a ready-made indictment looking for a crime. Black Lives Matter was at the center of a very large network, including hundreds of leftist organizations sharing the same vision. Among them: The Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Dream Defenders, Hands Up United, Black Left Unity Network, Black Workers for Justice, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Right to the City Alliance, School of Unity and Liberation, Dignity and Power Now, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, Causa Justa/Just Cause, Organization for Black Struggle, Communist Party USA, Showing Up for Racial Justice, and others.

Many of these organizations are funded by America’s largest corporations and philanthropies, including the Ben & Jerry Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Margaret Casey Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and George Soros’s Open Society Institute.

. . .

Black Lives Matter was formed in 2013 by three self-styled “Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries,” who selected as their movement icon convicted cop-killer and Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur.[4] Shakur had fled to Cuba after being convicted of the homicide she committed when her car was stopped for a broken tail-light by two New Jersey state troopers. Without any warning, Shakur shot trooper Werner Foerster. The 34-year- old Vietnam veteran was lying wounded on the ground pleading for his life, when Shakur walked over and executed him. Officer Foerster left a widow and a three-year-old son.[5] Black Lives Matter activists refer to the murderer as “our beloved Assata Shakur” and chant her words as a ritual, “at every meeting, every event, every action, every freeway we’ve shut down, every mall we’ve shut down.” [6] The chant is this: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and support one another. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” The last line is lifted directly from the conclusion to the Communist Manifesto, a document and war cry that has led to the murders of millions.[7]

. . .

The full account is here.

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