Mike Lee on the Green New Deal

Haven’t posted in a while, but too funny not to post.

The Second Amendment Itself is Common Sense Gun Reform

From youtuber Styxhexenhammer666, a parallel universe version of Razorfist/the Rageaholic.  From a couple months back, but hits the nail on the head.

Trump Just Said What? – and Ramifications

Lots to catch up on since last post.  Ben Shapiro covers a handful of things rather well, hitting on Trump being squishy at best on the Second Amendment and plenty willing to bargain away citizens’ rights as part of a deal with gleeful tyrant Feinstein, as well as failures on economics by pushing for tariffs.

Specifically what Shapiro said about Trump’s ignorant comments about the Second Amendment and due process have come to bear fruit in Florida in the time since Shapiro posted that video.  Florida, a state with a GOP supermajority in the state house & senate, passed a gun control bill that takes away rights of those from 18-20 years old, as well as passing a nebulous ban on “bump stocks” that can very easily be broadly interpreted.

I expected gun policy to be the kind of thing that Don Jr. would keep in check, seeing as how by his familiarity with firearms and firearms laws he’s the most knowledgeable and connected in the White House, but that looks like it tragically may not be the case.

Never Forget – 16 Years On

Every year but this one I’ve done this post for September 11:

9/11/01

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9/11/12

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This year I’m a day late.  Intentionally.

I ended up thinking about how we’re 16 years now from an unprovoked terrorist attack that killed thousands, and that in those 16 years, so many people have forgotten, or were young enough to never understand.  Someone who’s 21 years old today was five when the WTC towers fell.  Someone who’s 18 today was 2 then.  They weren’t there to see what happened then, they weren’t around to follow what happened afterwards, they weren’t there to be aware of what was going on.

And it’s those younger Americans who will eventually lead the nation, those who never experienced anything and aren’t guilty of forgetting; but those who only learn what others tell them – what others choose to or neglect to teach.

For what amounts to a generation we’ve heard obfuscations and lies about the motivations of the WTC terrorists because it’s not politically correct to identify jihad for what it is.  Jihadi islamic supremacists have an ethos and an ideology they can communicate.  The opposition to Islamic theocratic tyranny by Western values have gotten harder and harder for the Western world to communicate as the Western world slowly deconstructs itself, judging the problems of the past (that were overcome) by shifting radical ideas and using radical judgement of history as a justification for judging the present must be destroyed so a new history can be rewritten.  That the Western public rejects it is immaterial, because the radicals have tools of power to coerce the public into tolerance, then acceptance, then embracing, what those radicals desire – lest those who reject it face ostracism or the laws of the state.

The only thing that may keep the Enlightenment West afloat is that the radical illiberal progressive dogma is a new thing to be questioned, and perhaps a cultural resurgence can throw off that enemy from within.  The enemies of the Enlightenment West don’t change their minds or approach.  They are still, 16 years later, fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, Africa and Asia, and bringing smaller attacks worldwide to Europe and the Americas.  There’s a saying from a terrible man about how people will naturally choose a strong horse over a weak horse.

After 9/11, the shoe bomber, the Boston Marathon bombers, the Pulse Nightclub massacre, San Bernadino, Charlie Hebdo, Brussels, 7/7, Fort Hood, and many, many, many more, the jihadi assault on the Western world (and Eastern world as well) should be as easy a thing to discuss and remember publicly as it is for individuals, rather than one that publicly gets increasingly difficult to address and increasingly hazy with time.

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.

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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.

ATF Gunwalker – Fast & Furious 6 (or 8) Years Later

The ATF started smuggling guns into Mexico in 2009, then got found out in 2011.  This goes back a long, long ways, and was one of the reasons this blog was started – initially we wanted to cover all kinds of political stuff, but the ATF’s Fast & Furious and sister smuggling operations dominated things for a long time.  Under Obama, nothing was done.  He exerted executive privelege and made all the relevant documents that he and Eric Holder knew about disappear from the public eye, all while claiming nothing happened, all while blood continued (and still continues) to flow in Mexico and in the US.  Holder was held in contempt by Congress for stonewalling their investigation into Fast & Furious, and it showed us how transparently biased much of the media was, especially on Fast & Furious.  Sharyl Atkisson, the CBS reporter who brought the story to the mainstream, was later personally targeted by the Obama administration and eventually left CBS.  David Codrea, one of the bloggers who first broke the story when it was still just “gunwalker”, is still around; sadly the other who helped break it, Mike Vanderbough of Sipsey Street Irregulars, is no longer with us – he was one of those guys with a very long memory and the kind of person who because they were tuned in for decades provided valuable perspective on the players involved at higher levels.  Katie Pavlich, who wrote a book on Fast & Furious, was on the story for years and years, and has moved up a bit in the blogging/reporting world, and still brings some light to the issue when there’s a chance, especially as Fast & Furious within the various gunwalking operations took place in her backyard of Arizona.

So now, years later, with a new president, new administration, new attorney general, it’s being revisited.  We’ll just have to see if anyone’s willing to actually prosecute the ATF and their DOJ counterparts.  Sadly the rule of the swamp is “only banana republics go after the previous administrations, so no current administration will ever go after a prior one for criminal actions”.

Another hearing was held on 6/7/17, which covers mostly old ground.

And the full hearing:

It starts at around 15 minutes or so.

I haven’t watched the whole thing yet, but I’m sure there are things that are forgotten.  In particular one thing that isn’t heard as much anymore is how this was a push by the ATF/DOJ/Obama admin for more gun control, as evidenced by the multiple-gun reporting for southwestern border states being mandated by the ATF, as well as political cries for further restrictions.

A few highlights from the last 6 years or so::

Obama Blames US For Gun Violence In Mexico

Gunwalker Update: Gun Control Celebration at ATF

Gunwalker Update: Feinstein Uses Fast and Furious to Push Gun Control, Gunwalker Being Used to Push Gun Control, Issa Introduces Whistleblower Protection Law, Issa & Grassley Digging Into F&F Investigation Leaks

Gunwalker Update: Public Relations Operation?

Something else to give this further perspective over time is that the last link there includes Stratfor’s debunking of the “90% of guns in Mexico come from the US” lie, which they pointed out is deliberately lying about the facts.  The numbers at the time were something closer to 12-17%, but the 90% number that’s run with by anti-gun politicians and actors comes from the percentage of guns from the US that Mexico sends to the US for tracing.  IIRC the numbers were something like 22,000 guns seized by Mexican authorities back in 2010, with 18,000 being from Mexico or other nations; with some 2-3000 being sent to the US because maybe they’re from the US, and then 90% of that smaller portion being traced to the US.  I go over this here, because as another note to how time has passed, Stratfor was hacked back in 2012 and parts of their website now only exist on the webarchive/wayback machine.

Also in that same last link there is reference to Bob Owens of PJ Media, who went on to start Bearing Arms, and who tragically committed suicide a few months ago.

He also wrote one of the best articles that delineates the clear differences between Bush’s Wide Receiver and Obama’s Fast & Furious/Castaway/unnamed TX operation Gunwalking programs.  Wide Receiver was a Bush ATF program from 2007 that sent tried to track guns south and have the Mexican authorities and ATF in Mexico catch the bad guys; versus Fast and Furious and the various parallel gunwalking programs like Operation Castaway in Florida – all of Obama’s DOJ’s programs that sent guns south and had no notification to any authorities in Mexico, not =Mexican nor US ATF in Mexico; nor other nations guns were sent to by the ATF.  During testimony in 2011, ATF Mexico attache Darren Gil explained how he was utterly blindsided by Fast & Furious and didn’t hear of it until through some backchannels someone asked him “how’s that gunwalking program going?” which neither he nor any other ATF in Mexico nor Mexican authorities had ever heard of.

Wide Receiver was what leftist useful idiots would refer to and try to use to obfuscate Fast & Furious and make it seem like it was a “botched sting”.  Fast & Furious was not a “botched sting”.

It deliberately sent guns to Mexico to recover them at crime scenes after people had been murdered.  That was what was intended.  Once people accept those facts – as laid about by the ATF agents either whistleblowing or being grilled in front of Oversight & Reform in 2011 and ever since, it leads to the question of “why?” of which there are only two answers – either deliberately undermining the US constitution through a manufactured murder crisis in Mexico and/or influencing Mexico cartel politics by arming cartels.  The question then simply becomes “who is responsible for this and will they be held accountable?”  Six years in and we know the ATF bottom to top was responsible, the DOJ from Lanny Breuer to Eric Holder was responsible, and we know the executive branch to Obama knew about it (he talked about it in an interview even before Eric Holder finally fessed up to knowing about it).

So far, no one’s been held accountable.  The ATF has retaliated against their whistleblowers and rewarded their gunsmuggling criminal agents, but little else.

Midway

75 years ago.

Appabend’s “Why You Don’t Hire Ideologues”

I’ve been following a lot of youtubers recently, many of whom cover things on the topics of culture/SJW progressivism in society from angles and in ways more detailed than mainstream media ever could.

Appabend is the handle of a young (late teens-20s) Indonesian youtuber who mostly focuses on comic books, video games, manga/anime, and other aspects of pop/nerd culture.

He’s part of that group of people who were otherwise just enjoying their hobbies and diversions and minding their own business and then got mugged by games journalists during Gamergate.

He also provides a different non-Western perspective on Western pop-culture – and here he covers a little side-story of an Islamic ideologue (I’ll be kind and stick with his term for the guy) who got a job with Marvel comics, then went out and inserted subtle phrases and codes that aren’t so subtle if you’re aware of them… all because the Islamic bigot ideologue hated the mayor of Jakarta.

He frequently makes the point that SJWs ruin everything – and specifically they ruin comics by forcing SJW demands in that people don’t want.  The example is frequently that a beloved character who’s decades and decades old is warped into some SJW lunacy for the sake of SJW lunacy… when a new character could be introduced with no offense to the fans.  When the SJWs complain about people hating the new characters, they blame the audience rather than acknowledge they screwed up the characters.

As an anecdotal example, I used to buy a few different comics frequently.  I followed Batman during the late 90s-early 2000s when they did the Batman No-Man’s-Land arc, I followed Top 10, Powers, a bit of the Transformers/GI Joe reboots, and to probably no one’s surprise still reading this, Punisher (after the 2000 or so Marvel Knights/MAX reboot that grounded the character again).  I dropped most of them by the early 2000s, but followed Punisher for several years, then stopped around the late 2000s when the decision was made to have the Punisher put on a Confederate flag t-shirt and go to the desert southwest to fight “Hatemonger” as a propaganda lesson from the publishers in “anyone who wants secure borders is a giant white racist”.  And just like that, a comic alienated a core reader.

This was well before the current wave of SJW influence in comics, this was more the “NY/NYC/big-city leftist who knows nothing of the outside world and simply stereotypes the rest of the nation as racist hicks in flyover country”… much like we see with the demonization of Trump voters today and of Bush voters 16 & 12 years ago.  It was an earlier generation of SJW-ing, but that was enough that Marvel alienated a reader – and I doubt I’m the only one.

The Horrors of Deportation To Mexico

Delightful sarcasm from Sargon.

Quite entertaining to see someone from across the pond objectively fisk some Al Jazeera leftist propaganda about deportation.