During the Obama administration, all these Democrats were silent

AGREED: "it’s worth a full-on embed" writes Glenn Reynolds
— of Ted Cruz's pointing out the double standards of
Congressional Democrats’ newfound concern for the rule of law

Legal Insurrection: When a blog is "a bit too effective at tweaking" the "left wing cry-bullies", the Left strikes back

It's a sad Friday the 13th for the Legal Insurrection blog, for the conservative movement, and for free speech generally (thanks to Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds):

YouTube took down Legal Insurrection’s Channel without any prior notice based on “multiple third-party claims of copyright infringement,” but we never received any claims of infringement.

We have lost hundreds of videos, including a lot of original content on important news subjects. You now will see disabled videos in hundreds of our posts.

The following will hardly come as relief for William A. Jacobson, but I figured out some basic rules years ago: For the past years, every video (and audio) that I have made and every TV show (or radio show) I have appeared in, I have duly downloaded to my hard drive—in addition to copying it to an external drive.

Besides that, we regularly — about once a month — copy the No Pasarán blog onto our hard drive as well (Blogger > Settings > Other > Back up Content).

From Legal Insurrection's comments section:

Comments

Redneck Law | January 13, 2017 at 8:05 am

LI clear violation of TOS: PWC
(*posting while conservative)

Sanddog | January 12, 2017 at 11:03 pm

No proof necessary, just the claims of left wing cry-bullies.

nyc | January 13, 2017 at 7:35 am

Whining–no one does it better than the liberal left.

Tom Servo | January 12, 2017 at 11:17 pm

You were obviously a bit too effective at tweaking the progs.
 This is how faithful progs with power take their revenge.

The only consolation is that this is just a minor, minor taste of what the left would have done to all of us from now on if Hillary had won. Scratch a leftist and you will always find a vicious totalitarian hiding under the surface.

DINORightMarie | January 13, 2017 at 12:44 am

Twitter Gulag.

FB account suspension.

YouTube Channel shut down. Etc. Rinse, repeat.

You are hitting the right people in the right places.

And this is how they retaliate. Alinsky-tactics.

(My guess – BDS sees you’re effective, so you’re their target.)

Granny | January 13, 2017 at 1:20 am

Sadly, I am not in the least surprised.
Always keep a copy of every video you post.

RodFC | January 13, 2017 at 1:52 am

BTW. The videos may not be lost, but you should always have your own copy just in case.

Believe me, this is a painful lesson for a lot of people.

Chaosman | January 13, 2017 at 5:01 am

Best of luck. If/when your channel is restored, make sure to download your videos from the video manager and keep three copies of each video you want to save. Two copies on premises one copy off premises.

Update — from Fox News:

On Friday the publisher received notification from YouTube that the copyright claims were filed by the Modern Languages Association (MLA) based on audio posted of a recent MLA vote on a resolution to boycott Israeli universities. The boycott resolution at the MLA Delegate Assembly failed.

"Clearly this was a politically motivated move," he told FoxNews.com. "I never received any request or complaint from MLA. These were perfectly legitimate fair use excerpts with great news value."

"This is an attempt to silence our reporting on a matter of great public importance," added Jacobson, whose website reported on the vote. "We intend to pursue all available remedies, and call on YouTube to restore our account."

There ain’t a word, thought, deed, symbol, piece of legislation, or news item that cannot be imbued with a racial angle when there’s a determined race hustler around

As President Obama prepares to make his merciful exit from office

writes Benny Huang incredulously over at the Constitution website,

he’s taken time to tell a Chicago reporter that race relations have improved on his watch.

He spoke these words in the same city where four young blacks recently kidnapped and tortured a mentally retarded white man while shouting “F**k white people!” and “F**k Donald Trump!” as they livestreamed the whole thing on Facebook. And he did all of this with a straight face.

“The good news is that the next generation that’s coming behind us…have smarter, better, more thoughtful attitudes about race,” said the failed president. What he means by this is that an entire multiracial generation of Americans has been raised on lessons about white privilege and minority victimhood. They’ve internalized this ideology so completely that they simply can’t interact with people who don’t share it.

Barack Obama’s historic presidency was supposed to unite us. I don’t think his “failure” to do so is an accident. He spent eight years agitating just like his hero Saul Alinsky and his mentor Frank Marshall Davis did. The results were predictable—anger, chaos, and violence. Cops have been murdered, neighborhoods have been torched, and innocent people have had their lives ruined. Before Barack Obama came along we were making progress in this country toward demoting race to a nonissue. Now it’s the issue, the all-consuming concern that supersedes all others. Race is everything and everything is racial.

It’s killing our nation.

President Obama’s remarks remind me of a creeping feeling I’ve had of late that I write entirely too many columns about race. It wasn’t always this way. Back when I was in college I made a name for myself on the staff of the student newspaper as a rabid “anti-choice” activist because I wrote regularly about our on-going baby holocaust. These days I rarely address the subject and I feel a little guilty about it. Planned Parenthood is still running its Murder, Inc., so why aren’t I writing more about it?

The answer is that I, like too many other conservatives, play defense. I respond to what’s happening in the political realm. In my college years I wrote so much about the evils of the abortion industry because race was not nearly as important as it is now. These days, with so much emphasis on race, I feel compelled to respond to the all the idiocy that people spout about “white privilege” and our poor, maligned president who just can’t catch a break because no black man can in this horrible, racist country. I want to point out that white-on-black crime is exceedingly rare, that no one cares when cops shoot white people, and that the Department of Justice does not dispense equal justice under the law but instead prefers blacks above all others.

And yet here I am writing another column about race. It’s very difficult to write about anything else when every issue has been racialized. Race and racism are inescapable.

There isn’t a word, thought, deed, symbol, piece of legislation, or news item that cannot be imbued with a racial angle when there’s a determined race hustler around.

Gun control? You betcha. Michael Moore, producer of the anti-second amendment “Bowling for Columbine,” racialized that issue in 2012. Said Moore:

“We’ve got over a quarter-billion guns in people’s homes. And they’re mostly in the suburbs and rural areas where there is virtually no crime and no murder. So why is that? What are they really afraid of? What do they think of — who’s going to break into the house? Do they think it’s little freckled-face Jimmy down the street? I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s who they’re afraid of. And it cuts down to the heart of our race problem that we still haven’t resolved.”

Moore’s argument is self-defeating. For starters, he’s essentially admitting the validity of the “more guns less crime” argument advanced by John Lott in his book by the same name. Furthermore, does it make any sense to believe that people who live far away from blacks are really afraid that blacks are going to break into their homes? No, those are the worries of urban dwellers, many of whom favor gun control because they don’t want blacks to have them. No matter, Michael Moore has declared the exercise of our right under the US Constitution to be a form of racist neuroticism. End of discussion.

The issue of illegal immigration (often called just “immigration”) has become so intertwined with race that it’s hard to believe that anyone ever saw it through any other lens. I recall being a soldier stationed in Germany in 2002 when I met a Bulgarian girl who flippantly mentioned that her best friend from Bulgaria was living as an illegal alien in Chicago. (Bulgarians are white Eastern Europeans, by the way.) I was shocked. At the time I didn’t consider any racial dimension to the illegal immigration issue. I didn’t care then, just as I don’t care now, what color the illegal immigrants are. They should come in the right way or not at all. It’s not a racial issue, it’s a rule of law issue.
 
But there I go again using those racial dog whistles. My “law and order” rhetoric is racist according to National Public Radio. During the 2016 campaign NPR ran an outlandish piece entitled “Is Trump’s Call For ‘Law and Order’ a Coded Racial Message?” Apparently only a racist could want that. Non-racists prefer lawlessness and disorder—which happens to be what Barack Obama has wrought.

Just when I thought that the constant racialization of everything couldn’t get any worse, it did.

Even I was taken aback when New York City legalized (or “decriminalized”) public urination because those kind of laws are raaaaaaacist!

“We know that the system has been really rigged against communities of color in particular,” city council member Melissa Mark-Viverito, a Democrat, told the New York Times. “So the question has always been, what can we do in this job to minimize unnecessary interaction with the criminal justice system, so that these young people can really fulfill their potential?”

My guess is that minorities are disproportionately punished for public urination because they disproportionately offend just as they disproportionately violate most other laws—except Asians of course, but I guess the system isn’t “rigged” against yellow people.

We’re living in a racial bonfire and our public officials just keep pouring gasoline on it. Speaking in defense of the Black Lives Matter movement, President Obama bemoaned the problem of the unfair treatment blacks receive at the hands of police. “The African-American community is not just making this up…It’s real.” Well yes they are making it up and Obama should acknowledge this if he wants to be called a leader. They made up the Ferguson narrative which was a complete fabrication. They tried to railroad the cops in Baltimore before the prosecution disintegrated in court. They made up a ridiculous story about a supposed unarmed black man in Charlotte, Keith Scott, reading a book in his car before being besieged by racist cops. The officer who shot him, by the way, was black. He also wasn’t charged with anything because he did nothing wrong.

 … But that’s what scummy race-baiters like Eric Holder do. They tell lies to agitate, to divide, to make this group of people resentful and that group of people defensive. There’s no excuse for it. Let’s hope that this kind of poison politics goes out with Obama.

We Americans are ruled by a non-religious elite and we seem unbothered by it—and not just in politics but in culture and education as well

News flash from National Public Radio: There aren’t enough atheists in Congress! This is really a problem and NPR wants to rally the electorate to remedy it. In an article entitled “Non-Religious Americans Remain Far Under-Represented in Congress” NPR bemoaned the lack of unbelievers serving on Capitol Hill.

Thus does Benny Huang start another outstanding column.

I’ve got news for NPR—there are plenty of godless heathens in politics. Very few elected officials publicly claim atheism or agnosticism but their actions betray what’s in their hearts. For all of the talk about how rabidly religious Americans are we continue to vote for people who are very secular in their outlooks and in their voting records. There is no pandemic of religious fervor in the United States. We’re ruled by a non-religious elite and we seem unbothered by it—and not just in politics but in culture and education as well. Among those non-religious elite I would certainly count Donald Trump. Perhaps he has certain qualities that are needed at this moment but he’s not a religious man.

I realize that I am treading on thin ice here. There’s an unwritten rule in politics that an elected official’s professed faith should never be questioned—or at least not if you think the person’s religious deception is a bad thing. Barack Obama is a good example of this. The media have spilled plenty of ink “debunking” the supposed myth that the president is not a Christian.

Here’s one from Timothy Stanley at CNN. His opening sentence: “One of the strangest right-wing conspiracies is that Barack Obama is not really a Christian.” I think he meant to say “conspiracy theories” but whatever. It’s not a conspiracy or a theory, it’s just Barack Obama telling lies which I’ve noticed he does quite a bit. This is a man who once said that “Sin is being out of alignment with my values.” Seriously? Actually, sin is being out of alignment with God’s values. I can only conclude that Barack Obama is his own higher power.

Which leads me to my next question—who are these fools who think Obama is a Muslim? That’s ridiculous. Barack Obama is a secular humanist just like the mother who raised him and the absent father he idolized. He joined a church that teaches black victimology while calling it Christianity—and he likely only did that because he had political aspirations.

But the late Christopher Hitchens speculated with some certainty that Barack Obama is an atheist and I don’t recall him being chastised for it. Why? Because Christopher Hitchens was also an atheist and therefore considered Obama’s atheism a plus. Hitchens’s doubts about Obama’s purported religion were somehow acceptable but if you happen to be a Christian who’s sick of seeing President Obama fraudulently sporting your religion on his sleeve, you’re a conspiracy theorist.

So there are actually plenty of non-religious people in politics. Why don’t they identify themselves? There are several reasons, I think. The first is prejudice, which I gather from the NPR article is their preferred explanation.

 … But there are other reasons why more atheist politicians don’t just fess up. One reason is that it inoculates them from accusations of anti-Christian bigotry which is rampant in the jackass party. Take Nancy Pelosi, for example. I consider Pelosi to be an anti-Christian bigot but she’s able to parry the accusation by claiming to be just as Catholic as Catholic can be. This is a woman who never misses an opportunity to mention her Catholicism, sometimes misrepresenting Catholic doctrine to justify her Left Coast policy positions. Nancy Pelosi may have a baptismal certificate but she really worships at the altar of statist liberalism. She should probably just admit it and stop making a mockery of her (and my) religion.

But why would she do that? Then she couldn’t smother criticisms that she despises Christianity. That’s the real reason why she misrepresents herself. It’s not as if San Francisco voters would send her packing if they thought she was an apostate. A 2015 study from the Public Religion Research Institute found San Francisco to be the third least religious city in the country. Only Portland and Seattle had higher proportions of non-believers. Pelosi’s constituents are comfortable with atheism, just as they are comfortable with sodomy on parade down Castro Street. It’s Catholicism that make them squirm—especially its teachings on butt sex. She would pay no penalty at the polls for admitting the obvious fact that she isn’t really Catholic after all. Still she persists with her lies.

The NPR article left me wondering just what’s wrong with too few atheists or, as I think they really meant to say, too many of those darn Christians serving in Congress.

 … Maybe NPR should start looking more like America and give a show to someone who isn’t a coastal liberal elitist for a change. Might I suggest Larry the Cable Guy?