Donald Trump at CPAC

True to his promise from 2017, Donald Trump returned to the CPAC gathering at the Gaylord Hotel to a rousing speech.

The two photos above were taken by White House photographer Neshan Naltchayan (Twitter). 


Who dat at 2:08?

These men didn’t want a cake, they wanted to find a Christian and ruin him

This week, Christian baker Jack Phillips won the narrowest of victories at the Supreme Court

writes Benny Huang,

when seven justices sided with him in a case involving a Colorado private sector nondiscrimination law.

As many commentators have noted, the court seems to have dodged the Big Question at the heart of the matter—whether private sector nondiscrimination laws can be used to compel artisans to create messages that they object to. In one of the greatest copouts of all time the court ruled in Phillips’s favor only because members of the Colorado “Civil Rights” Commission (chortle) displayed clear bias against his religion.

“The neutral and respectful consideration to which Phillips was entitled was compromised here,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy. “The Civil Rights Commission’s treatment of his case has some elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs that motivated his objection.”

And that’s an understatement. One commissioner, Diann Rice, sounded much like that blithering idiot who comments on every news item that involves our first freedom:

“Freedom of religion and religion has [sic] been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the Holocaust. I mean, we can list hundreds of situations where freedom of religion has been used to justify discrimination. And to me it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use – to use their religion to hurt others.”

Yeah, because everyone knows that the Nazis were huge advocates for religious freedom.

Actually, no they were not. … The Nazis were opponents of both religious freedom and religion generally.

If the Holocaust teaches us a lesson it’s about state power and the suppression of dissent not that religious freedom is dangerous.

And make no mistake about it, Diann Rice is terrified of religious freedom. When arguments like hers are advanced, we’re no longer having a conversation about what religious freedom means but rather whether it should exist. …

In a way, this supposedly groundbreaking decision was anticlimactic. Government bureaucrats will continue to use these abominable laws as weapons against people of faith, they’ll just be more circumspect in their remarks. No more comparing peaceful noninterference in someone else’s wedding to the slaughter of eleven million innocents. No more berating the victims of these laws as religious bigots. They’ll even pretend, as Diann Rice didn’t, to respect religion and the free exercise thereof.

But nothing will really change.

Why? Because these laws do not impinge on free exercise and free speech rights by happenstance. This is not like a Muslim woman claiming that she’s been discriminated against because she can’t board a plane while wearing a veil over her face. This is targeted retribution against people who harbor views that are disfavored by the state.

Which is what the First Amendment was designed to protect us from. If it fails us now it’s worthless.

When the government uses laws to target certain groups of people, it is treading on constitutional thin ice. Liberals seem to understand this which explains why they constantly argue that perfectly reasonable laws that seem neutral on their face are in fact discriminatory. These laws disproportionately impact one group or another—but usually blacks. The reason for this, of course, is that blacks offend nearly all laws at higher rates than the general population.

Nonetheless, liberals see discrimination hiding behind every law. Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, for example, recently announced that his office will no longer prosecute possession of small quantities of marijuana because that’s raaaacist! In 2016, Gotham also “decriminalized” littering and public urination because those laws are racist too.

Any law that liberals don’t like is immediately attacked as discriminatory. Felon disenfranchisement laws, literacy tests, mandatory minimum sentences, even laws against loitering. An Obama-appointed federal judge recently found Texas’s voter ID law to be racist in intent and effect. How the court discerned the intent is very much unclear because there was no smoking gun. If it feels racist it must have been intended as racist.

The voter ID case raises some interesting questions. Is a law’s effect on one group sufficient to strike it down? Or is intent required too? If the effect is so manifest that it can’t be denied, can intent be inferred as the judge in the voter ID law case appeared to do?

I ask these questions because the law that Jack Phillips just beat in court is actually biased in effect and intent. The impact here does not just fall “disproportionately” on people of faith; it falls exclusively on us! While liberals may pretend not to detect the bias inherent in this law, I suspect that they really just love the discriminatory effect too much to part with it.

There’s some evidence that Jack Phillips’s business was targeted precisely because he was known around town as a deeply religious man. Much like Hobby Lobby, faith was integral to his business’s brand. Phillips had previously declined orders for Halloween-themed baked goods, divorce parties, and bachelor parties.

Then one day in 2012, Dave Mullins and Charlie Craig entered the shop and tried to order a wedding cake, which was a strange request considering the fact that they were actually having their ceremony 2000 miles away in Provincetown, Massachusetts. They later claimed that they wanted a pre-wedding party locally though I suspect that all they really wanted was to provoke a fight.

Jack Phillips, who mistakenly believed that he lived in a free country that respected its citizens’ rights to free speech and free exercise of religion, thought that he could decline this order just as he had other orders in the past. By Mullins’s own admission he exploded in anger, shouting “Fuck you and your homophobic cake shop!” …

And we’re supposed to believe that this was about equal access to goods and services.

There were plenty of other bakeries that would have gladly accepted their money. Phillips’s rights should not hinge on this fact but it happens to be true. These men didn’t want a cake, they wanted to find a Christian and ruin him.

But that’s not all they wanted. Laws have the ability to change hearts and minds—and not always gently. I don’t like this aspect of laws, of course, because I am extremely wary of governments sanctioning official beliefs and punishing all others.

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, for example, wrote a column in 2015 in which he expressed his view that church leaders need to face pressure to “take homosexuality off the sin list.” (Note to Bruni: only God can do that.) What’s worse is the context of Bruni’s column: he was writing about the controversy surrounding Indiana’s religious freedom law which he opposed. Clearly, he doesn’t like laws that might protect Christians from the legal pressure he wants to put on them to change their beliefs and eventually to change their churches’ doctrines.

I should really thank Bruni for his candor because he said what defenders’ of Colorado’s law wouldn’t dare say in court. The reason we have these laws is because society is in the midst of a revolutionary change and there can be no hold-outs. Government must lend a hand in corralling the last straggling institutions: churches.

Government has no business trying to change religious doctrine, not even by proxy. But that’s what it’s doing. It sees Big Religion as the last citadel of “homophobia,” a supposedly odious ideology that must be stamped out. They intend to achieve this by forcing Christians to make small compromises with their faith until they fully accept the homosexual agenda. Severe governmental penalties, including the loss of livelihood, have a tendency to make people rethink their core beliefs. This change in the individual Christians’ minds will put pressure on the churches to “take homosexuality off the sin list.”

And that’s why these laws offend the first amendment—not to mention the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments. Though the Supreme Court was too cowardly to decree it, there’s nothing neutral about “sexual orientation” nondiscrimination ordinances.

I’m happy that Jack Phillips was able to hold out against his tormentors but the rest of may not be so lucky because the state is on the tormentors’ side. Be forewarned: this fight isn’t over.

Living Under the Régime of the Doleful Censors: The Tyranny of the Thin-Skinned

The main story of this week's Le Point — which has become France's best weekly — is about the tyranny of the thin-skinned and the cacophony it entails, leading Raphaël Enthoven to say that we are living under the régime of the doleful:

The unanimous decision is the art of destroying or discrediting…

"New censors are raging. In the name of goodness, they control the language, are hermetic to humor, and pretend to be victims."

Actualité Vidéos

Sébastien Le Fol : « C'est la tyrannie des susceptibles »

Publié le 06/06/2018 | Le Point.fr

De nouveaux censeurs sévissent. Au nom du bien, ils contrôlent le langage, sont hermétiques au second degré et se posent en victimes. Enquête dans "Le Point" de la semaine.

How Much Fake News Is There in the BBC's Report on the Argentine Football Team's Refusal to Play Israel?

After reading the BBC's report on Argentina cancels Israel World Cup friendly after Gaza violence, my first reaction was that I wouldn’t be surprised if there is fake news involved in the reporting of this. Offhand, Argentina's leader and government ain’t known to be bad guys…

Read between the fake news lines, and I’m pretty sure that when

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu … was told by Mauricio Macri that "there was nothing that I could do"

the conversation was far from short and Argentina’s president was in fact being honest as well as contrite and even apologetic.

However, the Beeb makes it sound like he is standing up to the horrid leader of Israel, strong like a rock and eager to bring the conversation to an end and hang up the phone, and like the Argentine nation is united in this admirable (sic) position!

Keep reading: the same comment can be made for the following sentence:

Argentine Foreign Minister Jorge Faurie said he believed his country's footballers "were not willing to play the game".

Isn’t that the gist of the story?

The footballers alone (well, some of the team members, at least) — men who are renowned for (ahem) their profound intelligence and deep understanding of international relations — made the decision, i.e., perhaps two dozen citizens of the Argentine nation (pop. 44 million), and the politicians (rightists who would not corner much respect from artists and sportsmen in the first place) were unsuccessful in their efforts to get them to budge.

Go back to first paragraph: 

Argentina has cancelled a football World Cup warm-up match with Israel, apparently under pressure over Israel's treatment of Palestinians in Gaza.

Under the pressure of whom did Buenos Aires cancel the match?!

Not the international community, apparently, nor the Palestinians or the Arabs, but under the pressure of its own football team, which left it no choice.

The Palestinians and their allies got something right:

In Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Football Association issued a statement thanking Argentina striker Lionel Messi and his teammates.

… The campaign group Avaaz, which had called for the game to be cancelled, praised Argentina's football team for what it called a "brave ethical decision".

Thanking, or praising, the football team, and neither the Argentine government nor the Argentine people.

To this,  Daniel Aronstein (who brought the BBC report to my attention) disagreed vehemently, replying as follows:

this is not a private professional team; therefore placing blame on the cowardly appeasing antisemitic shits in the argentine govt is proper. I like macri's domestic economic policies, so far. but on this he and his comrades are shit. the argentine deep state covered up their complicit involvement in the iran/hizballah terror attack and the murder of nissman who was about to expose it. they are shit. they have decided to support islamoterrorists instead of israel genesis..... (12:3 is operative. as the usa is prospering at a 5% growth rate since moving embassy to jerusalem. so now argentina will descend.)

Hmmmm…

That would be disappointing…

AFP (no friend of Israel, the USA, or the right), however, has this (gracias por Stephen Green):

Israeli media said that late Tuesday Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Argentine President Mauricio Macri, with whom he has good relations, in an effort to save the match but that Macri had said he was unable to intervene. …/…

- Argentina team 'not willing' -

Argentine Foreign Minister Jorge Faurie said before confirmation of the game's cancellation that he believed his country's players had been reluctant to travel to Israel for the match.

"As far as I know, the players of the national team were not willing to play the game," Faurie said.

The status of Jerusalem, always a key sticking point in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, surged back to centre-stage when Trump tore up decades of US policy [don't you love the AFP's choice of words and expressions?!] to recognise it as Israel's capital in December. 

The juxtaposition of the law-breaking, but melodious, Obama administration next to boisterous and rowdy Trump presidency teaches us a lesson about our own moral blindness

[The] weird juxtaposition of the vacuous and often law-breaking, but melodious, Obama administration next to boisterous and rowdy Trump presidency has taught us a lesson about our own moral blindness.

Both our media and popular culture, as well as our cultural elite, value style far more than substance. Adroitly breaking the law is preferable to obeying it in uncivilized fashion. Boorishly bragging nonstop about 3 percent economic growth and below-4-percent unemployment is deemed far worse than contextualizing in professorial tones a stagnant economy that in eight years never achieved 3 percent annual growth.

Credentials empower illegality; their mere absence is seen as almost illegal in itself.

Lawlessly “presidential” is a misdemeanor; lawfully unpresidential, a felony. A bankrupt agenda delivered by experts is sanctified; an effective one packaged by amateurs is heretical.

Having engaged in illegality during the Obama administration is better on a résumé than following the law in a Trump government.

And yet still, this one constant keeps reverberating throughout the hysteria: Our elite always values the messenger over the message.

The façade of Camelot exempts empty lawlessness in a way that Queens-accented boosterism seems to nullify real achievement.

That is how Victor Davis Hanson concludes his National Review piece (thanks to Ann Althouse and Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds).

Call the Trump paradox “crass lawfulness.” What drives Trump’s critics nearly crazy is not any evidence that Trump has broken federal laws per se. Instead, their rub is that there are somehow no criminal statutes against a president boorishly acting “unpresidential” in his loud quest to supercharge the economy, while undoing the entire agenda of his predecessor, who was so dearly beloved by the media, universities, Hollywood, and identity-politics groups.

Certainly, President Obama’s teleprompted speeches were mellifluous. As some sort of postmodern preacher, Obama often sermonized to Americans about the predetermined “arc of history” that purportedly bent all of us inescapably toward his own just moral version of the universe.

In calm, ministerial tones, the progressive Obama sometimes slapped a puerile America’s wrists, with frequent admonitions to behave and to not act so illiberally. Or he frequently reminded us, with a frown, “that is not who we are.” Recall that Obama came into office promising that he would could lower the seas and cool the planet, with a generation of young like-minded activists who, we were lectured, were the ones we had all been waiting for. Now president emeritus Obama worries that perhaps his messianic appearance came too soon for us to fully appreciate his divinity.

Despite Obama’s recent projection that his eight-year tenure was “scandal-free,” along with the reality that the media’s biased compliance sought to make such a startling fantasy true, the Obama administration was in many respects lawless. It will eventually rank as the most scandal-ridden administration since Warren G. Harding’s.

Go to the National Review link to read the full list of The Scandals of the ‘Scandal-Free’ Obama Administration

But it was during the 2016 election cycle that the Obama administration descended to a level of corruption not seen in a century. Right in the middle of the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server, Obama, as judge and jury, announced that candidate Clinton had violated no criminal law while secretary of state. Obama also lied when he stated that he’d known nothing about such an unlawful server, although emails prove that he himself had communicated over it on several occasions.

His FBI director, James Comey, deliberately scrambled the law and exonerated Hillary Clinton from wrongdoing, not because she had not broken the law, but, according to Comey’s own invented interpretations of the statute, because she had not intended to violate the law. Comey also admitted to tailoring his circus-like investigation of Clinton around the assumption that she would soon be president.

We are slowly appreciating over the last year that lying under oath was an Obama-administration requisite for a high position in the intelligence community. FBI director Comey lied about the particular sequences of his investigation of the Clinton email scandal. He lied by omission to the president when, in his supposed Oval Office informative dissection of the Steele dossier, he failed to include the fact that it was a product of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC.

 … In addition to such unethical and often illegal behavior, the Obama administration institutionalized deception as a tool of government: hiding from the American people all the side agreements to the so-called Iran deal, itself a blatant effort to bypass the treaty-making responsibilities of the U.S. Senate; fabricating yarns to sell the disastrous Obamacare takeover of health care; using executive orders to enact immigration amnesties after warning that doing just that would be unconstitutional; lying repeatedly about the circumstances of the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner swap.

Hillary Clinton has never been able to explain why huge gifts to her family’s foundation from Russian interests coincided with the State Department’s approval of uranium sales to Russia, or why anyone would ever pay her husband $500,000 for a short speech in Moscow — and certainly would not now once her political ambitions have at last calcified.

We live in such strange times that the media ignored the most blatant examples of presidential campaign-cycle collusion in memory, while seeking to invent it where it never existed. Remember, Barack Obama on a hot mic not only got caught reiterating to a Russian leader the conditions of Putin-Obama election-cycle collusion, but he also spelled out the exact quid pro quo: promised Russian quietude abroad during Obama’s reelection campaign was in exchange for “flexibility” (i.e., cancellation) of U.S.-Eastern European missile-defense projects. Should Trump ever be caught making the same “deal” in 2020, he would probably be impeached.

Criminal Camelot vs. Crude Queens

Why was the Obama administration so corrupt?

Three reasons stand out.
One, it was the first administration in modern history in which the media saw its role as a subordinate and accomplice rather than an auditor; the media thereby empowered corruption.
Two, it exuded a moral zealousness in its promise to fundamentally transform the country and enact social justice; any means of doing so were justified by its exalted ends.
Three, like the John F. Kennedy administration, Obama and his team adroitly calculated that in America’s celebrity culture, what’s hip and cool is often more highly prized than what’s competent and lawful, much less crude and effective.

No one would suggest that Donald Trump obeys the law because he has an inherent respect for the Constitution and the nation’s ethical bearings, although that perhaps could prove to be so. Rather, Trump has not broken the law the way that Obama routinely did quite simply because he cannot. The media is so hostile to his every act, the popular culture has so frequently written him off as crude, and his critics, both progressive and conservative, have become so hysterical over his person, that he lives in a singular 24/7 bubble that faults him for everything from his choice of dessert to the manner in which his daughter holds her child.

The news, both fake and real, is now all Trump, all the time. And because Trump can enjoy baiting his opponents by deliberately being uncouth and coarse, and since he has little respect for past presidential protocol, almost everything is now transparent and nothing is off-limits. …

Filled with Blood and Sand and Tears

The story of D-Day.

The Subtext of Strangers' Questions in The New Yorker

Apparently, one Latino protesting against Uncle Sam is supposed to speak for all the other citizens of his country, if not the entire continent

Among the people coming out in protest against a European politician's anti-American caricatures were a couple of naysayers determined to extend the demonization of the Yankee nation.

See: If leftists (U.S. as well as foreign) can't depict the Indians as Buddhist-monk-like beings interested in only peace and harmony, it becomes much harder to depict (white) Americans as monsters

One of the demonizers of los Estados Unidos — as allegedly deaf to other peoples' voices, as allegedly indifferent to their customs — was pen Name who used that age-old leftist technique, the quote from a "respected" authority figure.

There is a long essay by Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet and diplomat, concerning US policies in Latin America. In that essay he observerd that US was a protestant polity in which it was posited that there could be a one-to-one relationship between Man and God. This fundamental belief of Christian Protestanism had fundamentally shaped the psyche of North Americans - it had defeaned (deaf) them to the voices of other peoples (their concerns, aspirations, etc.) because the North Americans were absorbed in this ongoing conversation with the Almighty. Thus they went and did whatever they wanted in Latin America (and now in the Near East) while oblivious to the protesting voices of Lations (and others).

To which a No Pasarán blogger replied as follows:

Has it ever occurred to anybody that maybe they should be listening to the Americans, at least part of the time (instead of always demanding that the U.S. listen to them)?! I mean, unless I am very mistaken, the U.S. has made a better life for most of its citizens than has any of the Latin American nations (and others).

In any case, "pen Name"'s post is quite symbolic, although he doesn't seem to realize it; While castigating Americans' individuality, he takes other nations' alleged collectivist thought for granted (as does Octavio Paz). Apparently, one Latino protesting against Uncle Sam (Castro, Chávez, etc, their respective intelligentsias, etc) is supposed to speak for all the other citizens of his country, if not the entire continent. Isn't this way of thinking the root of the problem to begin with?

If leftists (U.S. as well as foreign) can't depict the Indians as Buddhist-monk-like beings interested in only peace and harmony, it becomes much harder to depict (white) Americans as monsters

Americans and their allies reacted en masse on the Atlantic Review 11 years ago after Jörg Wolf reported from Germany on the anti-American caricatures of a national politician.

Peter Gauweiler of the conservative CSU party in Bavaria is a member of parliament and even member of the Bundestag committee on foreign relations. In an interview with the Deutschlandfunk radio about Chancellor Merkel's visit to the US and transatlantic relations, he called for some "tough talk among friends."

He expressed his opposition to US foreign policy in extremely drastic terms: After talking about the "Iraqization" of Afghanistan and saying that Germany should not support US policy in Southern Afghanistan, he opined: 

"We must make clear to Americans -- or to be more exact: to the current American government -- that not everything is automatically terrorism and that they cannot exterminate cultural aspirations on this Earth as they did with the Apaches and the Sioux."

Lots of interesting reactions, from among others, Jabba the Tutt and Isolationist. Two of the latter's four points are as follows:

(2) Many Americans know that Navahoe Americans were used as radio operators during the Pacific War, using their own difficult language in the open and driving the Japanese crazy in their code breaking efforts.

Fewer people know that a company size unit of Comanches Americans was landed on Utah Beach on or right after D-Day. These Comanches were also used as radio operators and "wind talkers" against Germany just like the Navahoes were used against Japan. It is nice to know that these Comanche Americans helped bring Dr. Gauweiler's Germany to its knees.

(3) The statements above about the Comanche confrontation with the Apache are true. In fact, so severe and relentless were the Comanches against the Apache that the latter, at one point, sought frontier peace with the Spanish in order to better defend themselves against the Comanches.

Indeed, among the posters reacting to Herr Gauweiler's facile oversimplifications was a No Pasarán blogger who had earlier expanded on Isolationist's third point:

Concerning the Apaches, why would the members of that tribe live in the arid rocks of Arizona rather than on the cooler and more fruitful plains of the Midwest? Well, the main reason is that they were chased away from their homeland, which was the plains. That's right, their land was stolen. Whom by, you ask? Those terrible white Americans? (Tch, tch, head shaking…) No, their land was seized by the Comanches.

Concerning extermination, meanwhile, if we can hardly find a single survivor of the Erie nation, it is because they were annihilated. Annihilated to the last woman and child. Likewise, the Hurons, massacred to the very last tribe member. Warriors scalped, women killed, babies with their brains smashed in. Whom by, you ask? Those genocidal whites? No, by the Iroquois.

Those are historical facts liberals and Europeans don't know about and do not like to focus on, because if they can't depict the Indians as harmless, Buddhist-monk-like beings interested in nothing but peace and harmony with the earth and with forces of nature, it becomes much harder to depict (white) Americans as monstrous beings and their policies (past as well as present) as of a criminal nature beyond rational control.

You may have heard the sentence attributed to Sheridan, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." The truth is that type of sentence (or the idea it contained) was much more often expressed by members of one Indian tribe about another (e.g., The only good Sioux is a dead Sioux) but that's something we must forget about in order to be able to shake our heads mournfully at those clueless (white) Americans, past and present, while congratulating ourselves incessantly for our top-notch lucidity, our unrivaled love of peace, and our rationality the kind of which the world has never seen. 

Related: Apparently, one Latino protesting against Uncle Sam is supposed to speak for all the other citizens of his country, if not the entire continent

2014: "Among the biggest obstacles to educating children are disruptive students whose antics, threats, and violence can make education virtually impossible": 4 Years Ago, Thomas Sowell Lambasted the Obama Policies that Would Lead to the Florida School Shooting

Four years ago, Thomas Sowell castigated the policies of the Obama administration that would lead, more or less directly to the Parkland school shooting. In April 2014, he wrote that

Of all the cynical frauds of the Obama administration, few are so despicable as sacrificing the education of poor and minority children to the interests of the teachers' unions.

Attorney General Eric Holder's attempt to suppress the spread of charter schools in Louisiana was just one of the signs of that cynicism. His nationwide threats of legal action against schools that discipline more black [and other minority] students than he thinks they should are at least as damaging.

Charter schools are hated by teachers' unions and by much of the educational establishment in general. They seem to be especially hated when they succeed in educating minority children whom the educational establishment says cannot be educated.

 … Fortunately, a court order prevented [the 2013] planned vindictive closing of this highly successful charter school [the American Indian Model Schools in Oakland, California] with minority students. But the attempt shows the animus and the cynical disregard of the education of children who have few other places to get a comparable education.

Attorney General Holder's threats of legal action against schools where minority students are disciplined more often than he wants are a much more sweeping and damaging blow to the education of poor and minority students across the country.

Among the biggest obstacles to educating children in many ghetto schools are disruptive students whose antics, threats and violence can make education virtually impossible. If only 10 percent of the students are this way, that sacrifices the education of the other 90 percent. 

The idea that Eric Holder, or anybody else, can sit in Washington and determine how many disciplinary actions against individual students are warranted or unwarranted in schools across the length and breadth of this country would be laughable if it were not so tragic.

Relying on racial statistics tells you nothing, unless you believe that black male students cannot possibly be more disruptive than Asian female students, or that students in crime-ridden neighborhoods cannot possibly require disciplinary actions more often than children in the most staid, middle-class neighborhoods.

Attorney General Holder is not fool enough to believe either of those things. Why then is he pursuing this numbers game?

The most obvious answer is politics. Anything that promotes a sense of grievance from charges of racial discrimination offers hope of energizing the black vote to turn out to vote for Democrats, which is especially needed when support from other voters is weakening in the wake of Obama administration scandals and fiascoes. …

Read the whole thing™…

Scandal in the UK after Policemen Infiltrate Protest Groups, and the Alpha Males End Up Bedding (and Even Marrying) Leftist Girls

Don't be fooled by the tone in Michael Gillard's Times article.

The crux of the "scandal" is not the outrage of several feminists and other activists (male and female alike) over two things — 1) the fact that they (especially some of the ladies!) were fooled, and 2) because of some fiddly-duddly judge, a 70-year-old who had the gall to suggest that married men (and women) are more likely to be in a stable relationship.

The crux is that all women, whatever their political leanings (and whatever their vocal protests over toxic masculinity), go for alpha males.

Police officers infiltrated a number of environmental and animal rights protest movements, and under the guise of fellow travellerdom, their alpha maleness apparently still shone through, as girls (aka "victims" of "professionally trained liars") went to bed with them and even ended up married to, and/or having children with, some of them!

Doesn't anyone know that (at least) half the male attendees in a protest march (without being undercover policemen, natch) have not much interest — alright, they may have a degree of sympathy — in whatever the object of the demonstration is and are really there only, or mainly, to meet a girl and get laid?!

 

(By the way, feel free to engage in jokes of undercover police…)

Michael Gillard and Eveline Lubbers:

Police officers working undercover may have been sleeping with political activists they were spying on for more than 40 years, according to newly released documents.

The public inquiry into the scandal disclosed the identity of an officer who is said to have had a sexual relationship with a radical student during the mid-Seventies. It is evidence to suggest that the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), set up in 1968, was a rogue Scotland Yard unit almost from the outset.

The undercover policing inquiry, led by Sir John Mitting, had thought that SDS officers were forming “deceitful relationships”, some of them resulting in the birth of children, from the Eighties. A woman has come forward, however, with evidence that an officer using the name Rick Gibson had had a relationship with her while on deployment between 1974 and 1976.

…/… In an interview with The Times “Mary” said … that her flatmate also slept with [an officer using the name Rick Gibson] and researchers have uncovered two other women with whom he had a sexual relationship.

In 2015 the Metropolitan Police apologised to eight women and acknowledged that officers who had relationships with targets were violating their human rights. The force did not contest the claims about Gibson.

Michael Gillard, earlier:

The judge chairing the public inquiry into undercover police who had sex with their activist targets has caused an outcry by saying that officers were less likely to enter illicit relationships if they were happily married.

Sir John Mitting’s “old-fashioned” views angered those who were duped into relationships, marriage and even having children with police officers who infiltrated the environmental and animal rights protest movements. His comments, and wider unease over his handling of the inquiry, are likely to lead to a boycott of proceedings by victims.

The inquiry has already cost more than £9 million but is not expected to hear any evidence until next year. It was ordered in 2014 by Theresa May as home secretary, but has been beset by delays.

Sir John, 70, said that his experience of life had shown that men who were in lengthy marriages were “less likely to have engaged in extramarital affairs”.

Victims told The Times that the remarks added to their concerns about the judge’s ability to carry out a proper investigation into police tactics that resulted in dozens of women being duped into relationships over three decades.

“Alison”, one of the eight women who successfully sued Scotland Yard, said: “How can someone who confesses to be so naive with regards to sexual politics be trusted as chair of a public inquiry tasked with exposing the truth about the deployment of professionally trained liars into the lives of female activists?”

Sajid Javid, the new home secretary, has been asked to appoint independent advisers to assist the judge. Core participants at the inquiry walked out in March over the judge’s unwillingness to release information, including cover names, about many of the officers. Another boycott is likely this week.

Sir John’s inquiry is scrutinising undercover policing and the activities of two covert units — Scotland Yard’s now defunct Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU).

Mrs May set up the inquiry after revelations that officers had formed relationships under false pretences with women they were spying on and used identities from dead children. There were also claims that officers spied on the family and supporters of Stephen Lawrence, 18, who was murdered in a racist attack in 1993. His father, Neville, was part of the recent walkout.

Sir John has been considering whether the cover names and real identities of officers should be released. Discussing an application in February, he indicated that he thought it was unlikely that the officer would have entered illicit relationships because he had a long marriage.

He said:

“We have had examples of undercover male officers who have gone through more than one long-term permanent relationship, sometimes simultaneously. There are also officers who have reached a ripe old age who are still married to the same woman that they were married to as a very young man. The experience of life tells one that the latter person is less likely to have engaged in extramarital affairs than the former.”

Phillippa Kaufmann, QC, who represents victims, said: “People do all sorts of things, specifically in relation to sexual issues, that many other people would never have expected of them.”

Sir John later said: “I may stand accused of being somewhat naive and a little old-fashioned,” adding that he would reconsider his views.

The Police Spies Out of Lives group, which has called for transparency, said that Sir John’s comments “shocked every person in the room”.

Be sure to read the comments…

Henry Scrope

“Sir John’s comment ‘shocked everyone in the room’”. His comment, carefully worded to allow for lots of exceptions, seems like common-sense. Who on earth was in the room?

gb901

How outrageous - an individual whose opinions do not match the pervading views of the self serving left leaning metropolitan liberal elite!

Brian Burnell

This judge appears to have acquired a dose of common sense.
Shouldn't be allowed.

Vlad the Impala

… How dare you let reason get in the way of our right to be offended.

SARAH

Hell hath no fury like a animal rights activist scorned.  I can't see the problem with the judge, nor his views, nor the thoughtful way he put them. The fact that he has publicly said he will reconsider his views is even more commendable.
He isn't a 30 somethings, he has not only had 70 years of experience, but experience as a judge seeing the problems we create for ourselves.
I am with the judge here!

Ken Wood

Watch out all those guys out for drink, on a golf/rugby/cricket trip etc who dis ingenuously swear they are single, not committed in any way.
And the ladies who flirt in a similar way.
Are we now asking to criminalize sexual relations in order to save the niave and stupid?
Please don t quote the " I would not have consented if I had known the truth about him/her"
Just about every divorce must echo to that refrain

“Administrative incompetence” and “computer failures” “beyond belief”: the miracle of state-controlled health care in the UK led to the deaths of up to 270 patients

Hundreds of thousands of women face an “agonising wait” of up to six months to be checked for breast cancer

writes Chris Smyth in the Times of London,

after an IT blunder which meant they were not called for screening led to the deaths of as many as 270 patients.

NHS bosses were trying last night to contact 309,000 women who were not invited to breast cancer checks because of computer failures dating back almost a decade.

Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, apologised for women’s lives being cut short by “administrative incompetence”, but said that some women affected would have to wait until the end of October for catch-up checks to avoid disrupting routine screening for those aged between 50 and 70.

Campaigners demanded that the NHS hire hundreds of extra staff or send women abroad to get the checks done. Labour said that the NHS should be given extra resources to carry out the checks, but the party’s response was tempered by the knowledge that it had been in power when the troubles began.

Public Health England, which runs the screening programme, is also facing questions. Mr Hunt told the Commons: “For many years oversight of [the] programme has not been good enough.”

 … Mr Hunt promised to write by the end of the month to all women affected, saying: “There may be some who receive a letter having had a recent terminal diagnosis. For them and others it is incredibly upsetting to know that you did not receive an invitation for screening at the correct time and totally devastating to hear you may have lost or be about to lose a loved one because of administrative incompetence.”

The NHS is promising to pay for staff overtime and to use the private sector to offer all women who missed out an appointment by the end of October.

Baroness Morgan of Drefelin, chief executive of the charity Breast Cancer Now, said it was “beyond belief” that the problem was undetected for so long.

“Beyond belief” is another way of saying Unexpected.

Peter O'Keefe: Misleading MSM Headlines Deliberately Obscure Both the Intent and the Merit in Trump's Policies

Guest editorial from Peter O'Keefe, an expatriate American in Paris and one of the earliest readers of No Pasarán (now in its 14th year):

Shortly after World War II, there was rarely a week that passed without someone in my social circle saying, ”You know … the Germans are perfectly nice people, just like you and me.

“It’s just that they were duped by the Nazi propaganda machine.”

Years passed before it occurred to me that if there was such a machine, every government on the planet, not to mention every business and every ambitious politician, would commit murder to get their hands on it.

A recent American headline was broadcast across the international wire services:

“ Feds Won’t Restore Grizzly Bear Protections Near Yellowstone National Park”

Most European readers immediately conclude that American President Donald Trump loves guns and hunters, hates forests and wildlife, and is abandoning the grizzly to the bloodlust of NRA zealots.

This interpretation was, of course, encouraged by the headline’s author, and endorsed by the editor(s).

This interpretation is, of course, entirely wrong.

Closer inspection of the article reveals that the Federal government is returning the responsibility for the management of wildlife to the various States. This is a deliberate Trump Policy, consistent with the stratification of authority outlined in the U.S. Constitution, and supported by two centuries of positive results.

The grizzly will again be cared for by people who know something about them.

Duh.

Unfortunately, few readers will delve beyond a headline unless the subject is of particular interest to them.

They will, however, recognize the implied message, and place it upon the balance scale of their judgement.

Regrettably, there is no equivalent to Rush Limbaugh in France.

Joy Reid wholeheartedly regrets writing that stuff she didn’t actually write; Also, she’s deeply remorseful for the pain she didn’t really cause

Joy Reid’s televised non-pology was perhaps the most awkward thing Benny Huang has seen all year.

The host of MSNBC’s AM Joy began her April 28^th segment by delivering a mea culpa for “homophobic” blog posts she wrote years ago while simultaneously maintaining that

“I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things because they are completely alien to me.”

Reid had earlier asserted that somehow her blog had been hacked, though that claim was demonstrated to be a preposterous lie. So she apologized—while still clinging to the hacking story.

Joy Reid wholeheartedly regrets writing that stuff she didn’t actually write. Also, she’s deeply remorseful for the pain she didn’t really cause.

Let’s take a moment to recap the situation. Before Reid had her own program she was a mainstay on The Rachel Maddow Show. Maddow is of course a homosexual. And before that, Joy Reid was an obscure blogger who liked to call prominent Republicans “closet cases.”

Chalk these comments up to mindless mimicry. Years ago, when conservatives used to stand against the homosexual agenda, “gays” used to taunt them by claiming that their foes were “on the down low”—secretly homosexual. The whole culture war was apparently an internecine battle between two groups of homosexuals—one closeted and the other out in the open. The taunt worked well because the homosexuals didn’t consider it insulting but it left their targets red-faced and fuming. 

Homosexuals knew that nothing bothered their opponents more than to say, “You’re one of us, you just won’t admit it.”

The taunt doesn’t work quite the same way when Joy uses it. It doesn’t even make sense because none of her targets have ever given any indication that they are homosexuals. Also, the “gay” activists who made similar taunts didn’t really consider them degrading because they obviously saw nothing wrong with butt sex. But she does. And that’s why she’s in trouble.

It’s clear from Reid’s posts that she thinks homosexuality is disgusting. Good for her. Most people, if they were honest, would admit that they agree with her. But that means that her jabs at Republicans were actually delivered as insults not merely intended to be received as insults.

And for that Reid must pay. Not a high price, mind you—she isn’t being banned from the planet earth as we’ve done to people like Brendan Eich. She’ll survive but first she must grovel a little.

I’m not offended, of course, and I won’t pretend that to be. Some of the things she said were clearly incorrect—Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove are not closeted homosexuals, for example—but that’s not the same as being offensive.

Other statements she made were spot on. Wrote Reid:

“Most straight people had a hard time being convinced to watch ‘Broke Back Mountain.’ (I admit that I couldn’t go see the movie either, despite my sister’s ringing endorsement, because I didn’t want to watch the two male characters having sex.) Does that make me homophobic? Probably.”

I didn’t go see that flick either. Liberals loved it because they love anything that promotes homosexuality, especially in conservative milieus such as the macho cowboy culture. But most normal people didn’t want to pay eight bucks to see two dudes ramming each others’ sphincters.

In another post Reid writes about “gay” culture’s weird obsession with teens.

“And then there are concerns that adult gay men tend to be attracted to very young, post-pubescent types, ‘bringing them into the lifestyle’ in a way that many people consider to be immoral. (Ditto with gay rights groups that seek to organize very young, impressionable teens who may have an inclination they are gay…)”

She’s right about that. Why do you think your kid’s school has a Gay-Straight Alliance? It’s a recruitment center.

 … After reading some of her posts I can say that I liked the old Joy Reid. She was someone I could have had a beer with. …

Reid’s blog posts reveal an urban black woman grappling with the new reality of progressive politics. She is, after all, the daughter of two very religious black immigrants and a cradle Democrat who grew up at a time when there seemed to be no conflict between the two. (Except for the baby-killing, of course.) But as “gay rights” started to rise to prominence within the party the space for people who wouldn’t celebrate homosexuality began to shrink. Religion was no excuse.

Blacks were often the slowest to adapt primarily because they are America’s most religious ethnic group. They are also less likely to consider sexuality to be comparable to race. This gap between black liberals and other liberals has narrowed quite a bit over the last ten years but it’s still there.

Joy Reid isn’t the first black person I’ve encountered who’s exhibited symptoms of cognitive dissonance when it comes to the new “LGBT”-obsessed progressive movement. These often religious blacks come up with a thousand rationalizations to explain why they vote for candidates whom they know in their heart of hearts don’t represent their values. If they were honest with themselves they would admit that their values aren’t nearly as important to them as their self-determined interests. The Democrats are still handing out free money, aren’t they?

There’s something very hypocritical about a person who used to write “homophobic” blog posts going on to join America’s most “woke” news network, MSNBC, and lecturing the rest of us about our supposed intolerance. And if I know anything about liberals it’s that they despise hypocrisy. Or at least they hypocritically pretend that they do.

 … Anyone who thinks she’s changed should first ask what the media would say about a conservative family values champion who was revealed to have done “gay” porn ten years ago. Would anyone say that he’s not hypocritical because he’s obviously turned over a new leaf?

Personally, I don’t believe that Reid ever had any genuine conversion experience. If she did, I’d like to know how and when it happened.

When did you stop being revolted by the idea of two men having sex, Joy? Do you still think they recruit kids or did you just stop caring if they do?

In all likelihood, she just learned to shut up. Toeing the party line was imperative to keeping her friends and advancing her career in journalism so she did what a lot of people have done and joined the mob.

She must have seen the objects of the mob’s hatred—Dan Cathy, David and Jesse Benham, Jack Phillips—and understood that they were only being savaged for saying aloud what she believes too. The moral and courageous thing to do would have been to defend these people. But of course she didn’t do that.

In that regard, Joy Reid is something like the Larry Craig of the Left. For those of you who don’t remember, Craig was a Republican senator from Idaho whose career ended in 2007 after he was caught soliciting sex from strangers in a Minneapolis airport men’s room.

The Left ate it up. The common refrain was that Craig’s moral turpitude lay in his hypocrisy not his actual offense. Why? Because Craig had voted for the Defense of Marriage Act—just like supermajorities of both parties.

The real scandal was that he opposed the Left’s legislative agenda. And when you think about it, that’s always the scandal.

Much like Larry Craig, Joy Reid’s real failing is her hypocrisy. There’s really nothing scandalous about her ten year old blog posts but there is something contemptible about the way she’s acted since joining MSNBC. She’s wagged her finger at us, virtue-signaled her butt off, and held her nose aloft because of her supposed tolerance and open-mindedness.

Then we found out the truth: Joy Reid is one of us, she just won’t admit it. …