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February 2018

Peter Thiel’s Warning to the Valley Hostility to half of America isn’t good business—or politics.

The news that billionaire investor Peter Thiel is decamping to Los Angeles to escape the stifling political conformity of Silicon Valley won’t shatter the republic, but pillars of the Valley would be wise to heed its warning. One reason the maestros of tech are becoming political targets is because they are seen as partisan and disdainful of middle America.

“Silicon Valley is a one-party state,” Mr. Thiel said last month during a debate at Stanford University. “That’s when you get in trouble politically in our society, when you’re all in one side.” He’s right.

Once such Valley icons as Intel and Hewlett-Packard were seen as nonpolitical. But the titans of recent vintage—Google, Facebook and others—are rightly seen as thoroughly allied with the political and cultural left. Google’s purging of conservative James Damore was something of a watershed of public recognition of this reality, and a declaration by a Facebook board member like Mr. Thiel is further affirmation of this bias.

Americans who once thought of Silicon Valley as a jewel of U.S. innovation are likely to turn against these companies if they see them as relentless political enemies. Mr. Thiel is giving his tech friends good advice.

Did My Mom Have ‘White Privilege’? She arrived from Italy in 1911 and then at age 14 went to work in a factory sewing ladies’ coats. By Angela Rocco DeCarlo

At the age of 14, my lovely mother went to work in a Chicago factory sewing ladies’ coats. It was 1918. She was a brilliant girl but couldn’t go to school because her family needed the income. Whenever I hear people rile about “white privilege,” I often wonder if they have my mother in mind.

Twelve million European immigrants passed through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954. Today, it’s estimated that 40% of the U.S. population is descended from these pioneers. My mother arrived with her parents, Christopher and Angela Serritella, in 1911. Like many immigrants of the era, they were so thrilled to be in beautiful America that they did whatever they thought proper to be good citizens. Grandfather Donato DiCarlo didn’t mind at all when an immigration official suggested Dan DeCarlo would sound more American. They happily learned English too.

My family came from Ricigliano, where practically everyone was named Serritella or related to someone who was. The town was inland from the beautiful seaside resort of Sorrento. It took monumental determination for people from Ricigliano to take the train to Naples for the Atlantic crossing, not knowing what they would find on the other side.

Many experienced discrimination, especially if their complexions were dark. During World War II thousands of American citizens with Italian names were rounded up and whisked away to detention areas. We don’t hear much about this anymore. Italians are not good complainers. Metropolitan Opera star Ezio Pinza was arrested and held for three months.

As a child I lived on Chicago’s South Monitor Avenue, across the street from Sam Giancana. We children didn’t really know who he was until years later. In 2013 New York’s Metropolitan Opera staged a production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” with a Frank Sinatra character as the libertine duke. During an intermission interview, one of the duke’s courtiers was introduced as Sam Giancana. I was the only one in the theater who laughed.

Not all Italians were opera stars. Some took to the dark side. The interesting thing about the Italian-American gangsters of old was they actually had a sense of loyalty and honor. They loved America. CONTINUE AT SITE

Antifa Rages Against Google’s Dissident James Damore is coming to Portland State, and ‘intersectionalists’ are issuing threats. By Andy Ngo

I belong to Freethinkers of Portland State University, a skeptic student group. On Saturday we’re hosting a panel on diversity featuring James Damore, the Google employee who was fired last July for writing a memo expressing heterodox views about sex disparities in the company’s workforce.

We expected controversy. But we also got danger. The left-wing newspaper Willamette Week published an article with a false and inflammatory headline: “Tech Bro Fired from Google for Saying Women Are Biologically Unfit to Be Engineers Will Speak at PSU Next Month.” The subheadline inaccurately attributed to Mr. Damore the view that “women can’t do math.”

Campus activists called us misogynists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis. A person claiming to work for campus audiovisual services tweeted that he could break into our event through a back entrance and “literally turn the whole building off.” There were threats of violence. A Facebook user—it’s not clear if he’s connected to PSU—suggested he’d throw “active grenades” at Mr. Damore onstage. Campus police took these threats seriously enough that they denied our request for a larger venue, despite overwhelming interest.

President Miller’s Immigration Veto Trump will never get a victory if he won’t ‘take the heat.’

President Trump may need a refresher course in deal-making after the Senate on Thursday rejected his take-it-or-leave-it offer on immigration. He could start by recalling who’s President, and stop giving adviser Stephen Miller a policy veto.

The Senate considered four amendments Thursday, and all failed to reach the 60 vote threshold to open debate. But the bill backed by Mr. Trump did the worst with a mere 39 votes. The amendment with the best chance of passing was a bipartisan effort negotiated by Susan Collins (Maine) and Mike Rounds (South Dakota) that had the support of eight Republicans and seven Democrats. It included the President’s biggest priorities as well as concessions from both parties, but it fell six votes short of 60 after the White House issued a veto threat.

In a bizarre mid-morning statement, the Administration warned that the bipartisan amendment “would drastically change our national immigration policy for the worse by weakening border security and undercutting existing immigration law” and “would undermine the safety and security of American families and impede economic growth for American workers.”

Did anyone tell Mr. Trump what’s in that amendment? It legalizes as many as 1.8 million Dreamer immigrant adults who were brought here illegally as children on Mr. Trump’s terms. But it also goes a long way to meeting the President’s other priorities. That includes authorizing $25 billion over 10 years for Mr. Trump’s wall on the Mexico-U.S. border. That’s a huge political victory on one of his main campaign promises.

Responding to Parkland The one solution that works is shooting back at shooters.

Add 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz to the list of disturbed young men who have committed mass murder against other young men and women in their communities. A partial list of these awful incidents includes Chris Harper-Mercer at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College; Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook school; James Holmes in Aurora, Colo.; Jared Lee Loughner in Tucson; and Cho Seung-Hui, who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007.

All these events have two things in common: guns and mental illness. From that fact flows the demand, every time, that we “do something.” Saying it, however, is not the same as doing something that would in fact mitigate this recurrent carnage. Doing something in our system inevitably means putting in motion an array of actors toward this goal—elected or appointed public officials, the police, the medical community and not least parents.

Guns first. When a Parkland happens, the liberal half of America’s politics puts forth the same two-word solution: gun control. There is a simple causality to this argument—fewer guns, fewer murders. Always left out is evidence it would work.

Gun-control laws—for example, to regulate bump stocks, AR-15s or ammunition magazines—foundered because advocates have never offered credible evidence they would deter mass shootings. Because gun proponents believe, not without reason, that the left’s ultimate goal is confiscation, the political prospects for a gun control solution have been and will remain about zero.

Behind the portrait of Barack Obama By Cindy Simpson

The selection of the artists painting the Obamas’ new portraits commissioned for the Smithsonian revealed much more than two pieces of “art.”

One would surely think that the chosen artists of the former president and first lady of the United States would have been carefully vetted – for quality of work, appropriateness of artistic style for the venue, and reputation in the community.

Barack Obama’s selection of Kehinde Wiley for his portrait is proving to be more atrocious than the painting itself.

The major media outlets, though, such as CNBC, were quick to observe a momentous occasion, breathlessly reporting that “The Obamas made history not only as the country’s first African-American presidential couple featured in the gallery but also for selecting the first African-American painters to receive a presidential portrait commission from the museum.”

That same CNBC piece also recounted the history of Obama’s personal selection of Wiley, writing that Obama “thinks ‘it’s safe to say Kehinde and I bonded'” and “how much he and Wiley had in common.”

It was the painting itself, however, and not the artist, upon which my friends in the conservative Twittersphere focused at first. I couldn’t help offering my own opinion, sarcastically tweeting my suggested title: “Obama Manspreads in Sea of Poison Ivy.”

The Media Stopped Reporting The Russia Collusion Story Because They Helped Create It Lee Smith

The press has played an active role in the Trump-Russia collusion story since its inception. It helped birth it.

Half the country wants to know why the press won’t cover the growing scandal now implicating the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice, and threatening to reach the State Department, Central Intelligence Agency, and perhaps even the Obama White House.

After all, the release last week of a less-redacted version of Sens. Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham’s January 4 letter showed that the FBI secured a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to search the communications of a Trump campaign adviser based on a piece of opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The Fourth Amendment rights of an American citizen were violated to allow one political party to spy on another.

If the press did its job and reported the facts, the argument goes, then it wouldn’t just be Republicans and Trump supporters demanding accountability and justice. Americans across the political spectrum would understand the nature and extent of the abuses and crimes touching not just on one political party and its presidential candidate but the rights of every American.

That’s all true, but irrelevant. The reasons the press won’t cover the story are suggested in the Graham-Grassley letter itself.

Political Espionage, By the Book George Neumayr

The peculiarities of Obamagate keep growing.

John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, gives himself this description on his Twitter account: “Nonpartisan American who is very concerned about our collective future.” In other words, Brennan is still in the disinformation business.

Liberal partisan who is very concerned about our collectivist future — that would be a more apt description for one of the most politicized CIA directors ever, whose ascent to the top of the CIA began with a lie-detector test in which he revealed that he was a supporter of the Soviet-controlled American Communist party.

Brennan was the fox guarding the henhouse — a role he played to the hilt for Hillary Clinton in 2016 as he set in motion a sham investigation into the Trump campaign. NBC recently signed Brennan up as a “national security” correspondent. So the fox will now get to comment on the henhouse he raided.

Where are the successors to the Kalb brothers to tsk-tsk news programs for using as “correspondents” on a story figures who have a vested interest in its outcome? Brennan is under Congressional investigation for possible perjury. But instead of challenging his yarn-spinning about the Steele dossier, NBC gives him a platform to continue it. How much longer before the media adds Sally Yates, Susan Rice, and (if they could get him) Christopher Steele as “correspondents”? What a farce.