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July 2020

Do Burning Cities Mark Start Of Democrats’ ‘Civil War 2.0’?

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/29/do-burning-cities-mark-start-of-democrats-civil-war-2-0/

The upsurge in rioting, looting, destruction and violence in cities across the country won’t just peter out, as many hope. Sadly, mainstream media outlets refuse to cover the actual news, while Democratic politicians actually express solidarity with those who are burning down our cities. It’s become obvious to one and all: The left media and so-called progressive Democrats would rather see urban bonfires than lose to Donald Trump in November.

Asked recently about 59 straight days of protests and violence in Portland, New York Rep. Jerry Nadler called reports of Antifa rioting there a “myth.” Not to be outdone, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi likened the federal police sent to quell the disturbances to “Nazis.”

This is today what passes for leadership in the Democratic Party, which since losing in 2016, has undergone an extreme makeover to become the most radical “mainstream” party in the U.S. in modern times. To find its equivalent, you’d have to go back to … let’s see, 1860 and 1861, when the very same Democratic Party convinced 11 states to secede from the union, thus setting off the Civil War.

Plus ça change, as the French would say.

Egged on in 2020 by that same radical party, Antifa, Black Lives Matter and other extremist groups have gone on an unchecked spree. Vandalism, looting, murders and politically motivated beatings have metastasized across the nation, making city after city into unlivable hellholes.

Attorney General Barr Scorches Democrats Matthew Vadum: Congressional Dems get exposed on their treacherous enabling of orgies of violence.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/attorney-general-barr-scorches-democrats-matthew-vadum/

U.S. Attorney General William Barr gave congressional Democrats a much-deserved dressing down for endlessly excusing the orgy of violence in cities across America that has followed the wrongful death of George Floyd in Minneapolis May 25 at the hands of police.

The Democratic Party officially endorsed Black Lives Matter in 2015 and has all but endorsed Antifa, the purported anti-fascists who embrace fascistic tactics in the name of combating fascism, a term they define promiscuously. President Donald Trump has vowed to designate Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.

Even the increasingly anti-American radicals at the New York Times, which gave birth to the hateful propaganda campaign known as the 1619 Project, have been forced to admit that many police have been injured in the violent nightly demonstrations that have raged for months.

In a court filing July 22, the U.S. attorney’s office in Oregon disclosed that 28 federal law enforcement officers had been injured as of that date during the civil unrest in Portland. Another court filing said there are now 114 federal law enforcement officers in Portland, brought in from federal agencies such as Customs and Border Protection and the Federal Protective Service. Local police said separately that 59 officers had been injured.

The deployment of federal agents to Portland began on the Fourth of July weekend. Reportedly, the crowds of angry subversives have since swelled from the hundreds to the thousands, as the radicals viewed the federal presence aimed at protecting federal property as a kind of invasion on their home turf.

Industrial-grade mortar fireworks have reportedly been fired at police officers and federal agents, and on July 27 a bomb was detonated at the federal courthouse in Portland.

The Confused And Pointless Rage Of An Entitled Generation By Matt Walsh

   https://www.dailywire.com/news/walsh-the-confused-and-pointless-rage-of-an-entitled-generation/

What happens when you take a generation of people, carefully instill in them an overriding sense of entitlement, give them lives of immeasurable comfort and ease, grant them every right and liberty known to man, but then at the same time tell them, somehow, incredibly, that they are oppressed — and then finally, after decades of this sort of schizophrenic conditioning, grant them free reign to express their confused and unearned rage in whatever way they desire, including felony vandalism and assault? Well, we are now seeing the results of that social experiment, and they are as ugly as expected — the country witnessing an eruption in rioting and mayhem by members of what the Feds generally describe as “violent anarchist” groups.

Indeed, the entitlement of these left-wing “protesters” — many of whom are white and by the Left’s own terms “privileged” — is the most striking and inescapable thing about them. These are people who believe they actually have the God-given — or whoever-given — right to shut down roads, stop traffic, intimidate, harass, assault, burn, loot, and pillage, without consequence. They really believe they have this right.

For example, DC activist Julia Clark posted a lengthy Twitter thread over the weekend complaining about cars that kept driving down roads that she and her comrades had decided to close. Of course they had no authority to close any roads at all, but that is a minor detail in Julia Clark’s mind. If Julia Clark decides that a road is closed, well then, damn it, it’s closed. And that’s all there is to it.

VIDEO: AG BARR: SINCE WHEN IS IT OKAY TO TRY AND BURN DOWN A FEDERAL COURT??

https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1288144511433150464

The lunacy of the ‘largely peaceful protest’ The media says one thing while also saying the opposite Roger Kimball

https://spectator.us/lunacy-largely-peaceful-protest-riots-orwell/

The great conundrum facing the anti-American left at the moment is how to react to the violent protest ripping up various Democratic-run cities. What is the preferred narrative? The two main choices are 1) it’s all peaceful protest, the ‘right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances’? or 2) let ’er rip: we’re out there destroying stuff and hurting people because the country’s falling apart and the sooner the better. Just so, a contributor to the Oregonian, announcing his fears of an impending ‘anti-democratic, racist police state’, wondered whether he would find ‘the courage to resist racism and fascism’, by which I suspect he means a free, open, and democratic election in which a candidate he does not favor has the indelicacy to win.

For it should go without saying that the overriding criterion for choosing which narrative to plug is this: which story will do the most damage to Donald Trump and Republican prospects in the November election?

By and large the media has opted for option one, reasoning that most people, taking note of the Democratic character of all the most serious sites of mayhem, might forget to blame Donald Trump for the rampaging fiends tearing up our cities and shooting toddlers, policemen, stray pedestrians and each other.

Charles Lipson: When ‘J’Accuse” Is Just a Smear The false, malicious attacks on Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass

https://spectator.us/jaccuse-smear-john-kass-chicago-tribune-george-soros/

Last week, the Chicago Tribune’s most prominent writer, John Kass, wrote a column decrying the rise in urban violence. Its compelling title: ‘Something grows in the big cities run by Democrats: an overwhelming sense of lawlessness.’

In today’s woke world, it is risky to speak such hard truths about gang shootings, unprosecuted shoplifting, looting, carjackings and more. This rising lawlessness is often cloaked in the language of protest, racial justice and income equality. Speaking out against it runs real risks. You might be doxxed, your home tagged with graffiti, or your family threatened. If you are a columnist, like John Kass, you might face ostracism from left-wing colleagues, attacks by the reporters’ union, and concessions to the mob by your paper’s editor, Colin McMahon.

The dispute began when the union representing Tribune writers (of which Kass is not a member) decided to go after him, full-bore. Their false charge was…wait for it…Kass’s column was anti-Semitic. Why? Because Kass noted that a major accelerant of urban violence has been the weak response by public officials, especially state and local prosecutors. Some of those prosecutors won office as part of a progressive political movement, specifically focused on winning control of prosecutors’ offices. That quiet movement had met with a lot of electoral success. One of its major supporters and funders is George Soros. Soros’s family background is Jewish.

More Praise for Mike Gonzalez’s The Plot to Change America By Roger Clegg

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/more-praise-for-mike-gonzalezs-the-plot-to-change-america/

This penetrating and insightful book — with the secondary title, “How Identity Politics Is Dividing the Land of the Free” — has already been favorably reviewed by us here. It also features a nice blurb from Rich Lowry (“an incisive, unsparing treatment of identity politics”), as well as from Michael Barone and Ben Shapiro. So it hardly needs my endorsement. But the publication date is this week, and I’d like to add briefly my enthusiastic two cents.

As the title of the earlier NR review indicates, the book’s principal theme is identifying “The Intellectual Roots of Today’s Identity Politics.” A second strong theme — as you would expect from the author, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a Cuban emigre to boot — is a critique of the results of this Left-rooted sickness. And Mr. Gonzalez’s third theme is prescriptive: He aims to answer the question, posed in a different context over 100 years ago by a rather influential leftist, “What is to be done?” As the author succinctly puts it:

To achieve that end [i.e., to defeat the plot to change America], the most urgent tasks are to expose myths, reveal what really happened, explain why it is urgent to change course, and offer a strategy to do so. Though we should not fool ourselves into thinking it will be easy to eliminate identity politics, we should not overthink it, either. Identity politics relies on the creation of groups, and then on giving people incentives to adhere to them. If we eliminate group making and the entitlements, we can get rid of identity politics. Explaining all this is this book’s main goal.

That’s from the introduction, by the way; if you’re able to read that (and the conclusion) online, you should, since it will persuade you better than anything I can write to read the rest of the book.

Democrats Make Mockery of Barr ‘Hearing’ By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/democrats-make-mockery-of-barr-hearing/

Barr brings out the worst in them, which is saying something.

If it’s a “hearing,” Bill Barr asked with an irked tongue in cheek, “aren’t I the one who’s supposed to be heard?”

His frustration was more than justified. Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.) and the other Democrats who control the House demanded for months that Barr come to a “hearing” and “testify.” But of course, it wasn’t anything like an actual hearing, and they didn’t want him to testify — as in actually answer questions. The session was a coveted election-year opportunity for Democrats to berate the attorney general of the United States in five-minute installments, accusing Barr of corruption, perjury, violating his oath, betraying the Constitution — at one point, even of killing thousands of COVID-19 victims (apparently, by being attorney general during a pandemic).

Especially at the beginning of the hearing, Barr easily parried the hostile questions — soliloquies with question-marks at the end. He picked apart their misstatements and disingenuous premises, and answered with aplomb. Democrats thus dropped the threadbare pretense that this was a hearing. In the main, the rest of the afternoon was devoted to raging, mock-anguished perorations about how Trump is a dictator and how Barr is helping him destroy our democracy.

These were punctuated by the occasional petulant demand that Barr answer “yes or no” a question that was either loaded or incoherent. When Barr would begin to answer, there would be foot-stomping, indignant, “I’m reclaiming my time” interruptions, claims that there was no question pending (usually after a question had just been posed), and then more Democrat filibustering about how the American people could clearly see that Barr was afraid to answer their questions . . . that they wouldn’t let him answer.

It was an embarrassing spectacle.

Barr Wins the Day By Rich Lowry

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/attorney-general-william-barr-excellent-witness-hostile-hearing/

The Barr hearing wasn’t very edifying, in large part because Democrats were utterly committed to keeping him from saying anything. One of them would make a sermonettte, pause to ask Barr a hostile question, and then angrily interrupt him when he started to answer, accusing him of taking up valuable time. Then, the sermonette would start up again.

One thing was definitely established, though — Democrats fervently believe that federal officers are attacking peaceful protesters in Portland.

Here is a typical riff from Representative Pramila Jayapal complaining that federal officers weren’t called in to crack down on anti-Whitmer protesters in Michigan:

Jayapal paints a highly misleading picture of the Michigan protesters, but, whatever you think of them, they weren’t attacking federal property or federal officers — the rioters in Portland are.

In general, Barr is an excellent witness. He’s sober, usually doesn’t let his irritation show (although he will spin his pen faster), never says more than he has to, and knows more than anyone else in the room.

It’s a tribute to how good he is that Democrats were desperate never to get caught up in a genuine back-and-forth with him