Private sector nondiscrimination laws are brutal, un-American, and unconstitutional; they are the weapons of bullies

Joanna Duka and Breanna Koski thought they lived in a free country

deadpans Benny Huang.

Silly girls.

The two Arizona small business owners make custom artwork for hire. They are also devout Christians. After hearing about nondiscrimination laws in other locales being used as weapons against people of faith, they began to realize how vulnerable they are. Their city, Phoenix, has a private sector nondiscrimination law covering “sexual orientation,” which is coded language for sexual conduct. Seeing that it was only a matter of time before the LGBT community decided to ambush them in the same way it did Colorado baker Jack Phillips, they decided to file suit against the city. The Arizona Supreme Court will hear their case in January.

As crazy as it sounds, violations of this law are punishable by hard time. That’s right — not making custom artwork for sham same-sex weddings is a crime so heinous that it can result in actual confinement. Every day that a violator persists in her violation carries a penalty of six months in prison.

I can just imagine these two ladies in a rough prison block filled with beefy, tattooed lesbians, who I am sure will be kind to them for what they have done for the “LGBT community.” The conversations would be comical. “What are you in for?” “Not making wedding invitations.” “No, seriously. All joking aside, what are you in for?”

The law in question runs roughshod over at least three provisions of the U.S. Constitution — free speech, free exercise of religion, and the prohibition on involuntary servitude — not to mention Arizona’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Come January, it ought to be eviscerated. Time will tell.

Duka and Koski seem to be hanging their hats on a free speech argument. For some reason, courts seem more sympathetic to those pleas, despite free speech and free exercise of religion having apparent equal footing in the Constitution. The women claim that they serve all customers but won’t use their talents to make artwork for all events.

Not that it matters to me. Their argument is sound, but a broader argument against all private sector nondiscrimination would be equally sound. Such laws are brutal, un-American, and unconstitutional.

Private sector nondiscrimination laws have an ugly history. No, there was never a time when they were “needed,” not even in the 1960s. Such laws were unconstitutional then, are now, and will be until such time as the Left repeals the amendments that they fervently despise.

Examples abound. …
  
 … I’ve always wondered what the point of these laws is, besides aggressive thought reform. If a person doesn’t want to live with, say, a Lithuanian-American, why would a Lithuanian-American want to live with someone who hates him? I’ve never received a satisfactory answer to that question.

 … Even Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker who won a Supreme Court case against homosexual bullies, isn’t immune from these kind of harassment lawsuits. Soon after his case was taken up, a transgender “woman” sued him for refusing to make a “gender transition” cake for his big revelation. In Phillips’s previous case, he was accused of discriminating because he willingly made wedding cakes for opposite-sex couples but not for same-sex couples. That’s blatant discrimination, right?

No. But even if it were, I wouldn’t care.

Phillips argued that he made cakes for all customers but not all occasions. But where is the parallel to transgenders? Was he willing to make cakes for “gender staying-the-same” parties but unwilling to make cakes for “gender transition parties?” This is insane.

 … Private sector nondiscrimination laws are anathema to our way of life. They do not enhance freedom in any sense of the word. They limit agency, property rights, and our constitutional protections. They are the weapons of bullies, and frankly, I don’t want bullies to have weapons. Tear them all down.

Joyeux Noël, mit einem Weihnachtsgeschenk — For a Christmas Gift for Conservatives, What Could Be Better than the Medienkritik Blog Back in Business?

Following the surprise tweet of America's Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, regarding the Claas Relotius scandal with, of all things, a David's Medienkritik collage, the sister blog of No Pasarán, which had lain dormant for years on end, announces that, after 10 years in der vilterness, it is back in business — and richly welcome its return is.

David's Medienkritik adds that in

a nutshell, the Relotius lies and fabrications reflected exactly the American boogeyman that has been sold to Germans for years now. We even put together a list of these stereotypes in 2008 - THIS IS NOTHING NEW - and they are still current today if you simply replace the word "Bush" with Trump".
Stereotypes most favored by Spiegel staff include:

• Americans are overbearing war-mongers bent on global domination who falsely claim they are spreading democracy when they are just spreading McDonalds and trying to control more oil fields
• Americans are heartless purveyors of capitalism, neglect the poor, and reject social safety nets
• Americans are trying to spread their superficial bubble gum, Disney, Hollywood culture worldwide to the detriment of all indigenous peoples - including even the Germans
• Americans are xenophobic racists 
• Americans are blindly patriotic, flag waving, USA-chanting, mind-numbed robots 
• Americans are militaristic gun nuts - everyone outside New York and Washington is packing machine guns
• Americans are obese fast-food gluttons
• Americans are hyper-religious Bible-thumping zealots who reject European humanism
• Americans don't care about the rest of the world or the environment (if only they could be environmental champions like the Germans!)
• Every current and recent military conflict involving the United States = Vietnam = quagmire = defeat
• The death penalty - did we mention the death penalty?
• Guantanamo - can we still talk about Guantanamo???

In fact, the reason that Mr. Relotius was not caught sooner is because his absurd contortion of reality was NOT absurd to his editors - it was a precise reflection of the "ugly America" that they have constructed and come to demand in an effort to maximize profit and keep readers supplied with their regular fix of resentment.  

And to offer all the evidence you might ever need, Medienkritk provides a link to its complete Spiegel archive… 

Anne Flora de Negroni: When I paint, I Become No More than the Paintbrush on the Canvas

Besides being a big dog lover, Anne Flora de Negroni is a Parisian artist in the 17ème arrondissement who has been painting since the age of 13:

la peinture a toujours été un refuge pour moi, j’aime ce moment où je peins, où je ne suis que le pinceau sur la toile, les yeux qui regardent avec attention.

The Troubling Parallels Between Today and the Watergate Era: The media was determined to "reverse the verdict of the election by non-constitutional means"; Trump 2016? No, Nixon 1972

What if, in the 1970s, Richard Nixon had had access to a Twitter account?

I'm askin', because your eyes are likely to open wide in disbelief as you read the description of the Watergate "scandal" in Paul Johnson's History of the American People.

You probably have always thought that no matter how good a president Richard Milhous Nixon may have been in certain areas, nobody can deny (nobody, that is, but a zealous — and untrustworthy — Republican hard-liner) that he was a shady (or a "flawed") character who, in no uncertain way, failed in one area that truly mattered, as Tricky Dick obviously did something very wrong (and illegal) and he was therefore some kind of conflicted Shakespearean soul who brought the scandal upon himself.

All I can say is: Prepare to be disillusioned.
(Update: thanks for the Instapundit link, Ed.)

Indeed, as you read about a Republican president's travails in the 1970s, you are going to think you are reading about the valiant fight to bring down the equivalent of Adolf Hitler by the likes of… Jim Acosta, Nancy Pelosi, and — yes — Robert Mueller.

In fact, as you read below, you are likely to think that so many coincidences can't be accidental, that the author can only have been writing with Donald Trump's White House in mind. As it happens, Paul Johnson's History of the American People was first published in 1997, the year after Bill Clinton's reelection.

Plus ça change…

(When you're done reading the (lengthy) excerpt in the post below, don't forget to check out Nixon and Watergate: What Do the MSM and History Books Fail to Tell Us About the 1970s Scandal? Money shot Money quote: "The truest description of what occurred in 1974 is not that the independent media brought down a president of the United States. What occurred was that the left-leaning MSM brought down a Republican.")

Without further ado, let us return to what Paul Johnson calls

"Watergate and the Putsch Against the Executive"

 … In parts of the media, there was an inclination to deny the legitimacy of Nixon's presidency and to seek to reverse the verdict by non-constitutional means.  …  'Remember,' Nixon told his staff, 'the press is the enemy.  When news is concerned, nobody in the press is a friend.  They are all enemies.'  That was increasingly true. …

 … at the time it was the triumphant Nixon who seemed to be in control, and his success not only humiliated the media liberals but actually frightened them.    …    The aim was to use the power of the press and TV to reverse the electoral verdict of 1972 which was felt to be, in some metaphorical sense, illegitimate — rather as conservative Germans, in the 1920s, had regarded the entire Weimar regime as illegitimate, or Latin American army generals, in the 1960s and 1970s, regarded elected but radical governments as illegitimate.  The media in the 1970s, rather like the Hispanic generals, felt that they were in some deep but intuitive sense the repository of the honor and conscience of the nation and had a quasi-constitutional duty to assert it in times of crises, whatever the means or the consequences.

This view was given some spurious justification by what was coming to be called the 'Imperial presidency,'  That the power of the executive had been growing since Woodrow Wilson's times, with dips in the Twenties and again in the late Forties and Fifties, was undeniable.

 … Nixon's reciprocal hostility to the media and his unwillingness to trust them, even more pronounced than under LBJ, persuaded some editors that 'something was going on,' which fitted into their other critical assumptions on what they termed the 'Nixon regime.'  And of course something was going on.  The White House was a power center engaged in all kinds of activities which would not always bear scrutiny.  It necessarily engaged, in a wicked, actual world, in the realpolitik which was theoretically banned by an idealistic Constitution.

 … Bad habits had set in under FDR

 … Though Truman and Eisenhower, who hated underhand dealings, kept clear of clandestine activities by their staff and the CIA, as a rule, they were generally aware of them and considered that in dealing with Soviet Russia and other totalitarian terror regimes, they were unavoidable

 … Kennedy's chief regret was that he had not made his brother Bobby head of the CIA, to bring it under family control

 … Under Kennedy and Johnson, phone-tapping increased markedly.  So did 'bugging' and 'taping.'

 … Until the Nixon era, the media was extremely selective in the publicity it gave to presidential wrongdoing

 … The anti-Nixon campaign, especially in the Washington Post and the New York Times, was continual, venomous, unscrupulous, inventive, and sometimes unlawful.  This was to be expected, and though it lowered the standard of US journalism, it was something Nixon was prepared to put up with.  What was more serious, and a matter which could not be ignored, was the theft, purchase, or leaking of secret material to these two papers (and others) and its subsequent appearance in print.  Under the First Amendment, legislation designed to protect military security, such as the British Official Secrets Act, was generally thought to be unconstitutional.

 … The appearance of secret material in newspapers shot up in spectacular fashion after Nixon assumed the presidency.     …     It is not known how many US lives were lost as a result of these leaks, but the damage to US interests was in some cases considerable

'Pentagon papers'

 … The administration discovered that publication of the source notes of the Pentagon papers, if analyzed by KGB experts, could jeopardize a whole range of CIA codes and operations.  So serious were the security breaches that at one point it was thought Ellsberg was a Soviet agent.

 … The Plumbers were engaged in a variety of activities of an entirely justifiable nature. … This break-in was the point at which the Nixon administration, albeit quite unknown to the President, overstepped the bounds of legality.  But at least it could be claimed that the infraction was dictated by national security

 … election-year dirty tricks were common.  Johnson had certainly 'bugged' Republican Party headquarters during the Goldwater campaign

 … However, in the paranoid atmosphere generated by the media's anti-Nixon vendetta, anything served as ammunition to hurl against the 'enemy.'  The Washington Post's editor, Ben Bradlee, was particularly angry, not to say hysterical

 … a series of 'investigative' articles seeking to make the Watergate burglary a major moral issue.

 … The campaign might have had no impact but the Post was lucky.  A publicity-hungry judge, John Sirica, known as 'Maximum John' from the severity of his sentences — and not a judge under any other circumstances likely to enjoy the approval of the liberal media — gave the burglars, when they came before him, provisional life-sentences to force them to provide evidence against members of the administration.

 … sadly typical of the judicial vendetta by means of which members of the Nixon administration were hounded and convicted of various offenses, chiefly obstructing justice — a notoriously easy charge to press home, granted a prejudiced judge.  In some cases the accused had no alternative but to plea-bargain, pleading guilty to lesser offenses, in order to avoid the financial ruin of an expensive defense.  Some of the sentences bore no conceivable relation to the gravity, or non-gravity, of the original offenses.

Thus the Watergate scandal 'broke,' and allowed the machinery of Congressional investigation, where of course the Democrats enjoyed majority control, to make a frontal assault on the 'Imperial Presidency.'

 … the witch hunters

 … These transcribed tapes, which the courts and Congressional investigators insisted Nixon hand over, were used to mount a putative impeachment of the President.  The witchhunt in the Senate was led by Sam Ervin, the man who had successfully covered up LBJ's crimes in the Bobby Baker affair, a shrewd and resourceful operator who concealed his acuteness and partisanship under a cloud of Southern wisecracking

(Haldeman had been driven into resignation by the witchhunters)

 … feeding all the damaging material they could muster to an eager anti-Nixon media … It became difficult for the President to handle an international crisis.  On October 6, 1973 a treacherous attack was launched on Israel, without warning, by Egypt and Syria, which had picked Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, for this Pearl-Harbor-type strike.  Both the CIA and Israel's secret intelligence service, Mossad, were caught napping, and the results were devastating.  The Israelis lost a fifth of their air force and a third of their tanks in four days, and it became necessary to resupply them.  The American media did not let up in its hunt for Nixon's scalp, but he actually had to deal with the crisis and save Israel from annihilation.  Nixon acted with great courage and decisiveness, cutting through red-tape, military and diplomatic obstructiveness and insisting that Israel be resupplied.

Without the resupply, which transformed Israel's sagging morale, it is likely that the Israeli army would have been destroyed and the entire Israeli nation exterminated.  Indeed it is probable that this is precisely what would have happened, had Nixon already been driven from his post at this stage.  As it was, he was still around to save Israel.  In many ways, October 1973, his last major international achievement, was his finest hour.

 … With darker times coming, the pressures on Nixon increased, and he strove desperately to combine two objects:  to preserve his presidency and to do what was in the national interest.

 … while Nixon was struggling to save Israel, he had been fanged by the man he called 'the viper we planted in our bosom,' Archibald Cox, special prosecutor charged with the Watergate inquiry

 …  It was at this point that hysteria usually associated with American witchhunts took over, and all reason, balance, and consideration for the national interest was abandoned.  It was an ugly moment in America's story and on which future historians      …    are likely to judge a dark hour in the history of a republic which prides itself in its love of order and its patient submissions to the rule of law

Incidentally, note that this blog has previously used Paul Johnson's monumental History of the American People to point out parallels between modern-day politics and elections in the 1960s and the 1970s:

• Evidence of Fraud in 2008 Election? (A Surprising Number of Parallels with JFK's 1960 Campaign)
• In 1976, a Democrat politician with very little experience "transcended" politics as usual and was lifted on waves of good will to the White House.

Let us end with a five-year-old post: in I knew Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon was a friend of mine, and you, Barack are no Richard Nixon (thanks to Instapundit), Bill Kristol hits, deliberately or otherwise, on the reasons why America's 37th president was so hated:

Will no one stand up for Richard Nixon? Richard Nixon was a combat veteran, a staunch and brave anti-Communist, a man who took on the liberal establishment and at times his own party's as well, a leader who often thought for himself and had the courage of his convictions, a president who assembled a first-rate Cabinet and one who—while flawed both in character and in policy judgment—usually tried to confront the real problems and deal with challenges of his times.

(As it happens, the former Weekly Standard [RIP] editor's NeverTrump attitude is all the more startling when you realize that Bill Kristol obviously seems to know all about the demonization and the hounding of a Republican president.)

Update: The press turned a blind eye to the corruption of JFK and LBJ, then raced to overturn the election of a man they despised by Andrew Klavan (thanks to Ed Driscoll):

That changes what Watergate means. That transforms it from a heroic crusade into a political hit job, Democrat hackery masquerading as nobility. The press turned a blind eye to the corruption of JFK and LBJ, then raced to overturn the election of a man they despised — despised in part because he battled the Communism many of them had espoused.

 … Journalism today is a corrupt shadow of even its biased former self. Competition, cutbacks and desperate attempts to appease a dwindling audience have turned former newspapers like the New York Times into little better than college rags run by starry-eyed leftist children and answerable to an audience that demands to have their prejudices confirmed.

As a result, the reportage on the Donald Trump administration has been a two and a half year hit job. The constant, breathless reporting of the incipient end of the administration — this is a tipping point, the walls are closing in, the president will be impeached! — has been nothing but the out-loud infantile fantasies of under-read underage make-believe radicals who are not equipped to do the job they are paid to do.

Update: What Trump learned from Watergate by Don Surber (thanks to Ed Driscoll):

The [Watergate] archives have revealed that Nixon was railroaded.

In American Spectator, [Geoff] Shepard wrote,

"There is documented proof of a series of secret meetings between Chief Judge John Sirica and Watergate prosecutors. I don’t know which is the bigger surprise: that they were secretly meeting to resolve issues in advance of trial or that they were documenting their agreements in memos to their files."

 … Archibald Cox in retrospect made Jimmy the Weasel Comey look honest.

The deep state won.

Shepard wrote,

"It should have come as no surprise that Cox delegated the Watergate Special Prosecution Force recruiting to James Vorenberg, a fellow law professor who had taught criminal law. Vorenberg hired only people whom he knew or who were recommended by people he knew, and he assembled a specially selected team of some 70 lawyers, virtually all Ivy League graduates, the top 17 of whom had worked together in the Kennedy/Johnson Department of Justice. Readers should note the constitutional inversion here: these were the very people voted out of office with Nixon’s 1968 election, now in control of the government’s investigative and prosecutorial powers. Vorenberg announced at their first press conference in June 1973 their intent to investigate each and every allegation of wrongdoing by the Nixon administration since it had assumed office some five years prior."

Sound familiar?

That is why this will not happen again, or at least not to President Donald John Trump. He learned the lesson of Watergate.

We said of Sarah Palin, we cannot spare her; she fights. Donald Trump does not simply fight; he wins.

He was in his 20s when he beat the deep state the first time. Nixon's HUD sued him in its administrative court, hoping to coerce an admission of guilt. Trump's lawyer -- the commie-beating Roy Cohn -- advised him to take HUD to real court. 2 years later, the charges were dropped.

 … President Trump learned from President Nixon's mishandling of the press.

 … after a year of propaganda by the media and Democrats, the public fell for the Democrat lies. Kennedy somehow became the victim. And he never had to give up drunk driving. Always bear in mind, the Germans were the best-educated people in the world when they fell for Nazism.

 … President Trump learned from Nixon's firing of Cox, which created a backlash. He kept Mueller, which avoided an obstruction of justice claim.

The president has needled and ridiculed the hapless Democrats, but he also has given them everything they asked for. When they objected to his July 25 phone call to Ukraine, President Trump released the transcript. There will be no nonsense about the cover-up being worse than the crime on his watch.

That transcript should have ended the controversy, but Adam Schiff is insane, Jerry Nadler is a fool, and the press is corrupt. Down the rabbit hole of impeachment they dove.

Public sentiment, the law, and the facts are in President Donald John Trump's favor. He learned from Nixon. it is not paranoia when they really are out to kill you.

What sparked the explosion of "les déplorables" in flyover France was an ever-growing skein of nanny-state regulations

Paris … hunkered down for the latest Yellow Saturday,the fourth in a row that has brought tens of thousands of yellow-jacketed protesters — the gilets jaunes — into the streets.

Thus reports Anne-Elisabeth Moutet from Paris in the New York Post.
(See also How Fake News Has Misrepresented the Yellow Vest Revolt in France and
BLOGGER IN PARIS IN THE MIDST OF TEAR GAS CANISTERS RAINING DOWN ON THE CROWDS (video))

Many come from the provinces, where President Emmanuel Macron’s gas tax would hit hardest. But their ranks also include growing numbers of violent activists from both political extremes — think antifa side-by-side with Charlottesville white supremacists. They [all converged] on the City of Light to scream at our aloof young leader that they’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Call them les déplorables.

Still, Macron says nothing. Instead, he sent out Prime Minister Édouard Philippe to promise technical measures that satisfy no one. The disintegration of Macron, once the president the world supposedly envied, is perhaps the most amazing part of this current flyover-France revolt.

He ticked all the boxes. He wanted more integration in the European Union. He’d fight populists at home and abroad. He’d put France back to work after three decades of 10 percent unemployment. He’d welcome more refugees. He’d save the planet!

Macron lectured President Trump, in good English, before Congress last spring. Save the Iran deal, he enjoined, and the Paris accord on climate. Concrete results? There were none, but the speech was broadcast live on all French news channels.

More recently, Macron pledged to sign an open-borders UN pact on world migration, which the US, Australia, Israel and a handful of European nations reject. He said France’s cherished secularist 1905 laws should be revised, largely to help the country’s newest religion, Islam, integrate within French society. Worst of all: Members of his party have indicated that Macron is willing to give up France’s UN Security Council seat to the European Union.

None of these decisions please anyone in the country, save the clone-like Macronista hipsters in Paris and a few large cities. They are men and women in their 30s and 40s — affluent, well-educated, in competitive jobs, able to afford the crazy rents in places like Paris, Bordeaux or Lyon.

Safe in gentrified neighborhoods, they welcome “diversity” and see themselves as morally superior. They welcomed a president in their own image, especially as he faced the National Front’s Marine Le Pen, the perfect foil, in last year’s election.

A new face, the people mistook Macron for a new broom: After all, he kicked out all the old, tired incumbents, left and right. Voters discounted the fact that he himself is a former top technocrat, bred in the most elite schools in the country. He believes in all the Davos pieties.

It was Macron’s green obsession that eventually sparked the explosion. The gilets jaunes are a grassroots movement, born in hundreds of provincial small towns and villages across the country. They are farmers, small businessmen, truck drivers, waiters, nurses — or jobless. They have no official spokespersons. It was on Facebook that they resolved to adopt as their symbol the yellow, high-visibility jackets that the French are required to keep in their cars in case of accidents.

For years, they have seen their livelihoods threatened — by plant closures, inflation, the disappearance of public services like small train lines, hospitals, schools and local post offices. They need their cars, however old and beat-up, to drive their kids to school, to shop, to find and hold a job.

Their lives are fenced in by an ever-growing skein of nanny-state regulations. Before the fuel tax, there was the unpopular rollback of the speed limit on France’s roads to 80 kilometers (49 miles) per hour from 90 (56). The same week, bureaucrats added dozens of new requirements for vehicles, forcing many cars off the road.

Macron’s government offered drivers a $4,500 bonus to buy electric cars: a Marie-Antoinette moment seen as an insult by les déplorables.

Resisting pressure to cave in, Macron conceded too little, too late … His job is secure; it would take a lot to remove him. But the time for the great reforms he was elected to make now seems past: All that’ll remain, hidden in his Élysée Palace, will be the youngest lame-duck president of the Fifth Republic.

BLOGGER IN PARIS IN THE MIDST OF TEAR GAS CANISTERS RAINING DOWN ON THE CROWDS (video)

 
The webmaster of No Pasarán almost felt he was being deliberately targeted as the tear gas canisters started raining down on the yellow vest protesters around him on the Avenue de Friedland, one of the roads leading up to the Place Charles de Gaulle l'Étoile, already covered not in fog but in tear gas.

Whether it was related or simply a coincidence, the crowds had started chanting "Macron ! Démission| (Macron resign!) when the bombardment started.

As I wrote last week, in How Fake News Has Misrepresented the Yellow Vest Revolt in France:

There is nary a single media report about the Yellow Vest demonstrations in Paris and France that I’ve read or watched that has not been slanted by Fake News.

It has (usually) not been deliberate, I gather, and nobody has said anything factually wrong; what is the problem is the fact that (very) important stuff has been omitted. (Update: merci au Professeur Glenn Reynolds.)

It is not wrong to say that the demonstrations were caused by the government's decision to raise gas prices. What is missing is that this is just one of several draconian measures dating back half a year, i.e., ‘tis the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

For the past four to five months, the French government has done nothing but double down on bringing more and more gratuitous oppression and more and more unwarranted persecution measures down on the necks the nation's drivers and motorcycle riders.

In fact, the imposition of ever harsher rules has been going on for the past decade and a half or so — whether the government was on the right or on the left …/…

 …/… What has been most irksome for les Français since the turn of the century has been the ubiquitous radars, which, like red-light cameras in the United States, are accused of having (far) more to do with bringing revenue to the state than with road safety.

And just like the arms industry in the Soviet Union, if there was one area of France where the technology was always moving forward, it was the radar business.

Over the years, the radars have become evermore stealthy and insidious. …/… What has happened since shows the Deep State at work in Europe just as much as, if not more than, in North America — and this leftist statism is the kind of news that has been ignored by the mainstream media, in France itself as much as abroad. …/…

WE ARE NOT MILCH COWS!

All of which brings us to 2018. This year, as mentioned, Emmanuel Macron's government has doubled down on the repressive measures.

• On July 1, Prime Minister Édouard Philippe did what no other country in Europe or in the West (or, as far as I  know, on the planet) has done: go against the march of progress and lower the slowness limit (sorry, the speed limit) on secondary (country) roads by 10 km/h, decreasing the limit from 90 km/h (56 mph) to 80 km/h (50 mph).
.
• At about the same time came the contracts that the government decided to write with private corporations, handing the business of the state's (plainclothes) gendarmes over to their company employees, to take over the business of the mobile radars in their shiny new fleets of vehicles. (Meanwhile, other private companies have been getting similar contracts from city governments, meaning wage earners doing mostly nothing but driving up and down the city streets, while a license plate reader decides which cars' owners will be getting automatically-generated fines.)

This is actually the point at which the first protests started. During the summer, the country saw a huge increase in instances of destruction (or incapacitation) of radars on the roadside. Many were defaced with paint, others were set on fire, while still others were simply covered with something like a garbage bag (one man arrested while covering a radar was let free by a judge who decided that since the garbage bag hadn't actually brought any physical harm to the machine in any way, the defendant could not be accused of destroying it).

• More recently, the government added more gratuitous sanctions to the driver’s license point system, which is already far more punitive than that of most European countries, not least neighboring Germany's.

• Finally, with the announcement of the gas prise rise, the French said "Enough is enough." And that was when the entire nation seemed to get together via the internet to mount the Yellow Vest revolt.

Guess What: Don't Democrats such as Beto in Fact Agree — 100%! — with Trump that Central American Countries Are Shitholes?!

As supporters call on Beto O'Rourke to run for president in 2020,

writes Chantal Da Silva in Newsweek (gracias por Instapundit—y tambien por Stephen Green),

the Texas Democrat slammed  Donald Trump administration's handling of the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.

In a message posted online to Medium on Sunday, O'Rourke called on the U.S. government to handle the situation at the southern border "the right way" after U.S. Border Patrol agents fired teargas at hundreds of Central American migrants who had rushed the U.S.-Mexico border.

"It should tell us something about her home country that a mother is willing to travel 2,000 miles with her 4-month old son to come here," O'Rourke, who lost his Senate bid against Republican incumbent Ted Cruz in the midterm elections, wrote in a message posted online to Medium.

Repeat after me: "It should tell us something about her home country that a mother is willing to travel 2,000 miles with her 4-month old son to come here."

Doesn't Robert Francis O'Rourke, in other words, agree — doesn't he agree 100% — with none other than… Donald Trump?!

When they moan the fate of the migrants and of the refugees, what are all Democrats and all leftists, American or foreign, doing if not essentially agreeing with the sentiment (if not the choice of words) allegedly expressed by Donald Trump — that those countries are (wait for it)… sh*tholes?

If you hold that there is a humanitarian crisis on the border, how can you not agree with Donald Trump, all the while accusing him of manufacturing a crisis?

In fact, what are the very migrants, legal or otherwise, and refugees from Central America and, in Europe, from the Middle East and Africa, saying — with their feet — if it isn't that the places they were born and have been living in are sh*tholes?!

As I write in What Kind of Startling Groups Might Tend to Agree with Trump About "Shithole Countries"?,

What kind of surprising groups might tend to agree with President Donald Trump on calling places like Haiti, El Salvador, and various nations in Africa "shithole countries", not to mention many others?

No, no, you're wrong: the answer is not those revolting racists who belong to the despicable Republican party.

1) The first jaw-dropping answer is (wait for it) the citizens of Haiti, the citizens of El Salvador, and the citizens of various nations in Africa, not to mention the citizens of many others.

 … you would be surprised to hear how many individuals agree if not with the wording itself, certainly with the sentiment behind it.

Indeed, isn't the very fact that so many of these citizens are emigrating to America, or to the West, in the first place a pretty strong sign of what they think, if not in those exact terms, of the regions they were born in?

Wittingly or otherwise, the Texas congressman from El Paso goes on to confirm as much:

"People are leaving violent countries where they fear for their lives," the Democrat wrote. "Without money, they are subsisting on hope for their kids, for themselves, that they can get to safety. After being denied the ability to lawfully petition for asylum for the last 10 days, they are desperate."

O'Rourke said that in the "longer term," the U.S. government must also "work with the people of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador," where many asylum seekers have traveled from over fears of violence and economic and political instability, "to address underlying conditions that are causing them to flee in the first place." 

Check out Beto's words again: "It should tell us something about [a refugee's] home country" [with its] "underlying conditions that are causing them to flee in the first place"; "People are desperate" to get out of the "violent countries where they fear for their lives"…

Translation: I, Beto O'Rourke; we, members of the Democrat Party; we, leftists all over the world, I/we agree with Donald Trump 100% that countries in Latin America are sh*tholes.

• Related: Even liberals know that Haiti, El Salvador, and Africa are “shitholes”; in fact, it seems to be their recurring argument for why we need to prioritize citizens of those nations in our immigration policy (!)

Furthermore:

"Those applicants ultimately granted asylum will then live in the U.S., make us a better country for being here"

If all these migrants are such outstanding citizens, why — why on Earth — would leftists not want them to go home for that very reason, in order to make their nations — their own nations (rather than the USA, which hardly needs those outstanding citizens) — better countries?!

Speaking of which: and to change the subject to gun violence: If los Estados Unidos is such a violent place, shouldn't Latin Americans be staying put?! Indeed, shouldn't the migratory movements be reversed, i.e., shouldn't masses of U.S. citizens be doing their utmost to escape the U.S. and be trying to immigrate, by any ways possible — legally or otherwise — to Mexico, to Honduras, to El Salvador?!

If Beto O'Rourke was president, here's how he would handle migrant caravan https://t.co/Id1rHslM9K pic.twitter.com/CvUBPbYMcr

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) November 26, 2018

How Fake News Has Misrepresented the Yellow Vest Revolt in France

Demonstrating with the Yellow Jackets on the Champs Élysées against la répression du gouvernement. It was quite festive in the beginning; but cats are not partial to tear gas, so when the tear gas grenades started raining around us, the bicycle cats said Enough and we pedaled home.

There is nary a single media report about the Yellow Vest demonstrations in Paris and France that I’ve read or watched that has not been slanted by Fake News.

NOTE: This post will be fully updated, greatly expanded, and, in the process, thoroughly rewritten for an article in the January 2019 issue of the New English Review entitled THE TRUTH ABOUT FRANCE'S YELLOW VESTS.

It has (usually) not been deliberate, I gather, and nobody has said anything factually wrong; what is the problem is the fact that crucial information has been omitted. (Update: merci au Professeur Glenn Reynolds, à Monsieur Pierre le Tech Mec, à Monsieur Francis Turner, et à la Ferme de Marguerite.)

It is not wrong to say that the demonstrations were caused by the government's decision to raise gas prices. What is missing is that this is just one of several draconian measures dating back half a year, i.e., ‘tis the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

For the past four to five months, the French government has done nothing but double down on bringing more and more gratuitous oppression and more and more unwarranted persecution measures down on the necks the nation's drivers and motorcycle riders.

In fact, the imposition of ever harsher rules has been going on for the past decade and a half or so — whether the government was on the right or on the left — and that is why the choice of les gilets jaunes (the yellow jackets) by the demonstrators is particularly ironic.

The 2008 law (under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy) requiring the presence of high-visibility vests (gilets de haute visibilité) aka security vests (gilets de sécurité) in every vehicle — hardly an unreasonable rule, for sure, as similar ones exist throughout the continent — was just another example of the myriad of evermore-onerous directives for car and motorcycle owners over the past 15 years, and so the government in effect provided the 2018 rebels with their uniforms.

What has been most irksome for les Français since the turn of the century has been the ubiquitous radars, which, like red-light cameras in the United States, are accused of having (far) more to do with bringing revenue to the state than with road safety.

And just like the arms industry in the Soviet Union, if there is one area of France where the technology was/is always moving forward, it is the radar sector.

Call it the radar-industrial complex.

Over the years, the radars have become evermore stealthy and insidious. For instance, radars have gone from contraptions being able to photograph a single car on only one side on the road, in the lane closest to the machine (with a burst of white flash quite jolting to the driver at nighttime), to taking multiple pictures over the entire roadway simultaneously of several vehicles driving in both directions.

The first radars were installed in 2003 under President Jacques Chirac and his interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, and in the beginning, drivers were always warned by a road sign when a radar could be expected ahead (which brought about exactly what allegedly was the desired goal, to get cars to slow down).

What has happened since shows the Deep State at work in Europe just as much as, if not more than, in North America — and this leftist statism is the kind of news that has been ignored by the mainstream media, in France itself as much as abroad.

Eventually — in spite of the insistent promises of then-interior minister Sarkozy — new radars were installed without road signs announcing their presence.

The schemes to make the rules harsher have at times been so far-fetched and outrageous that push-back was inevitable and led to their demise. For instance, the attempt to require all vehicles in the nation to be equipped with a breathalyzer. (Not surprisingly, it emerged that a breathalyzer manufacturer who, naturally, was a close friend of a number of politicians, was behind the bill.)

Recently came the news of mobile radars, as mentioned above, meaning unmarked cars loaded with a radar-installed contraption driven by gendarmes dressed in civilian clothes. (Everywhere, young boys daydream of wearing a shiny uniform and going into action to fight crime; imagine, then, a policeman being asked to remove his uniform and put on his plainclothes to do nothing but passively drive up and down the road or highway in an unmarked car and let the hidden radar do its work, i.e., making him trick his (otherwise honest) fellow citizens who have done nothing but "violate" a rather arbitrary administrative rule, a "speed" (sic) limit that has barely changed, if at all, in almost 50 years).

Meanwhile, crony capitalism has given rise to a side economy, a side economy whose only purpose revolves around the punishment of citizens with cars or motorcycles — not least with blossoming (and very expensive) driving schools for drivers to recoup at least some of the points they have lost on their driver's licenses (again, for violations of a rather arbitrary malum prohibitum rule). If and when they are down to 0 points, they are barred from returning to the schools and they lose the license itself, for a year or more — the licenses of some two million Frenchmen are currently suspended — which leads in turn to job losses for some 80,000 drivers every year, since they can no longer commute.

WE ARE NOT MILCH COWS!

All of which brings us to 2018. This year, as mentioned, Emmanuel Macron's government has doubled down on the repressive measures.

• On July 1, Prime Minister Édouard Philippe did what no other country in Europe or in the West (or, as far as I  know, on the planet) has done: go against the march of progress and lower the slowness limit (sorry, the speed limit) on secondary (country) roads by 10 km/h, decreasing the limit from 90 km/h (56 mph) to 80 km/h (50 mph).
.
• At about the same time came the contracts that the government decided to write with private corporations, handing the business of the state's (plainclothes) gendarmes over to their company employees, to take over the business of the mobile radars in their shiny new fleets of vehicles. (Meanwhile, other private companies have been getting similar contracts from city governments, meaning wage earners doing mostly nothing but driving up and down the city streets, while a license plate reader decides which cars' owners will be getting automatically-generated fines.)

This is actually the point at which the first protests started. During the summer, the country saw a huge increase in instances of destruction (or incapacitation) of radars on the roadside. Many were defaced with paint, others were set on fire, while still others were simply covered with something like a garbage bag (one man arrested while covering a radar was let free by a judge who decided that since the garbage bag hadn't actually brought any physical harm to the machine in any way, the defendant could not be accused of destroying it).

• More recently, the government added more gratuitous sanctions to the driver’s license point system, which is already far more punitive than that of most European countries, not least neighboring Germany's.

• Finally, with the announcement of the gas prise rise, the French said "Enough is enough." And that was when the entire nation seemed to get together via the internet to mount the Yellow Vest revolt.

Lire mes articles sur la répression, la persécution, et le matraquage des conducteurs :
https://www.contrepoints.org/author/erik-svane

Il y du Fake News ici — Les médias (francaises et internationales) rapportent que les manifestations sont contre la hausse des prix de l’essence.

Ce n’est pas faux, mais le Fake News, c’est ce qu’on ne dit pas.

En fait, ces hausses ne sont que la goutte qui fait déborder la vase, le dernier exemple de répression, de persécution, et de matraquage depuis 4-5 mois.

• D’abord Édouard Philippe a fait ce qu’aucun gouvernement d’Europe ou de l'Occident (ou de la planète) a fait — baisser la limite de lenteur (pardon, la limite de vitesse)

• Ensuite, il y a eu la multiplication des radars, des radars de plus en plus sournois

En fait, c’est durant l’été, à la suite de ces mesures, que les protestations ont commencé :
Par une hausse impressionnante des instances de destruction des radars sur le bas-côté de la route dans tout l'Hexagone

• Par la suite, le gouvernement a endurci le permis à points, de façon gratuite, avec des punitions grotesques

• Enfin, la hausse des prix de l’essence

Qu’est la démocratie si ce n’est
le pouvoir de dire aux autorités :
Nous ne sommes pas des vaches à lait !

Midterms Are the Main Topic of French Radio Show on Trump and America

Le 21 novembre 2018, le patron d'émission du Libre journal du Nouveau Monde recevait deux invités à Radio Courtoisie pour aborder “Le point sur l’actualité aux Etats-Unis”. Le blog Instapundit a notamment été évoqué (31:27)…

Cliquez sur le lien pour entendre l'émission d'une heure et demie…

Evelyne Joslain, assistée de Stanislas, reçoit : 

• Paul Reen, membre du groupe des Républicains américains à Paris
• Erik Svane, membre du groupe des Républicains américains à Paris

Thème : “Le point sur l’actualité aux Etats-Unis”

Evelyne Joslain, essayiste pro-Trump, est "très choquée de l'attitude de @EmmanuelMacron", estimant que le président français a "insulté @realDonaldTrump lâchement" #BalanceTonPost #BTP pic.twitter.com/5EKNMNNjto

— Balance Ton Post (@BalanceTonPost) November 17, 2018

Quelques jours plus tôt, l'auteur d'une poignée de livres sur les États-Unis apparaissait sur Balance ton Poste, un talk-show de Cyril Hanouna sur Canal +.

"Donald Trump est trop bien élevé" estime Evelyne Joslain, essayiste pro-Trump

Chaque vendredi en deuxième partie de soirée, Cyril Hanouna anime un nouveau talk-show... Qui ne parlera pas que de médias ! Cyril et sa nouvelle bande l'aborderont d'une manière divertissante autour de grands débats avec des rubriques originales et étonnantes.

Pour notre débat sur l'attitude de @realDonaldTrump, nous recevons :
👉 Jean-Eric Branaa, spécialiste de la politique américaine
👉 Evelyne Joslain, essayiste pro-Trump
👉 Mehammed Amadeus Mack, Américain et professeur de français pic.twitter.com/D2QUlEpa0q

— Balance Ton Post (@BalanceTonPost) November 17, 2018

Bilan de la présidence de @realDonaldTrump :
👉 Plus de deux millions d'emplois créés en 2017
👉 PIB : 3,2% en 2017
👉 Chômage : sous les 5% en 2018
👉 Taux de croissance record au 2ème trimestre 2018#BalanceTonPost #BTP pic.twitter.com/vGWumCaNbO

— Balance Ton Post (@BalanceTonPost) November 17, 2018

The 4 Key Facts About Obama's Birth Certificate Issue that Nobody Tells You

As Michelle Obama vows that she can never forgive President Donald Trump for spreading rumors that her husband was not born in America (deriding in her memoir, Becoming, the so-called "birther" conspiracy as thinly-veiled racism), there is one certain bet about the Barack Obama birth certificate issue over the past ten years (and counting).

It is that you do not know — and that Barack and Michelle (deliberately?) ignore — the four key issues involved, and/or that you do not realize the extent of their importance.

First, a(n unfortunately) necessary disclaimer: Out of over 13,333 posts in the past 14 years, less than 10 on this blog have been about the so-called "Birther" issue (and in a couple of those, it was never even the main subject). That amounts to more than 99.925% of No Pasarán posts that do not treat Obama's birth Certificate in any way. Just so you know that you can hardly accuse (or dismiss) No Pasarán or any one of its webmasters of being associated with alleged nutjobs (at least not with regards to that issue).

Having put that out of the way, let's get started:

1) The "Birther" issue did not rise among Republicans, conservatives, and/or the unruly rubes of flyover country

(aka the bitter clingers to guns and religion; or, if you prefer, aka the basket of deplorable and irredeemable racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, and Islamophobes). It started with the campaign of Hillary Clinton in 2008, involving — you know the tune — the compassionate, intelligent, humanistic, forward-looking fellow members of Obama's (and the Clintons') Democrat Party.


2) Far from being totally racist, twisted, dangerous, and/or simply abnormal, the ideas brought up by the alleged "Birther" issue (whether leveled by a Democrat or a Republican) turn out to be pretty conventional and run-of-the-mill.
And, that, on a ho-hum issue of secondary importance (aka a distraction).

May we be allowed to examine this issue — what MSM outlets like The Economist want us to dismiss instantly and categorically as "the absurd “birther” controversy" — fairly, coolly, and dispassionately?

As I wrote a few years ago, in a lengthy, an in-depth, and a dispassionate examination of the facts, of the nutjobs, and of Obama's youth:

 … Recall that Jesse Jackson tried running for president twice (in 1984 and 1988), and although he did not manage to become the Democratic Party's candidate, noone suggested that he was born abroad, and that for the simple reason that the Greenville, SC, native did not have a foreigner for a father (or for a mother) nor did he spend numerous years abroad. [Nor did Herman Cain or Ben Carson have to deal with such charges in their respective elections about a quarter century later, be it by Democrats or by the supporters of their GOP competitors.]

 … to believe that an American citizen (whatever the color of his skin) born to a foreign father who lived much of his childhood abroad may indeed have been born in a foreign country turns out not to be that far-fetched at all.

Indeed, the difference between the Truthers and the Birthers is that in the first case, we are being asked to believe that 1) hundreds, if not thousands, of government officials were approached with a view to conspire to kill thousands of their fellow citizens, all (or most) of them innocent civilians, that 2) hundreds, if not thousands, of government officials agreed (apparently without a moment of hesitation) to conspire to murder thousands of innocent civilians, and that 3) none of these hundreds (thousands) of government officials has ever had a single, even fleeting feeling of remorse, or let the cat out of the bag, say while having too much to drink (no remorse?) during a Saturday outing to a local bar.

In the second case, we do not even have a conspiracy, but basically one single man hypothetically telling a falsehood — although it might even be termed a lie of omission — a lie about what offhand is a personal matter, but has turned into the only thing (allegedly) keeping him from power (Update: The New York Times' Double Standard on Conspiracy Theories).

Most damning of all, when you pause to think of it, the castigators' proof — if it can be called that — all lies in one fact (beyond the recently released certificate of live birth): and that fact is that Obama is a man, a person, a saint whose word should never be doubted, who is capable of no lying, no evil, no chicanery. If he tells you that, say, he is a Christian, then how dare you deny he is a religious man?! How dare you imply that he is a Muslim?! How dare you state he is a socialist?!

The person who ridicules the "Birther" theory as inane has no more proof than the born-in-Hawaii skeptic of where Obama was actually born [or didn't have any more proof until over two years into Obama's presidency]: his only argument — beyond the contention that the certificate of live birth and the newspaper clipping are incontrovertible proof that are not, can not be, fakes, bureaucratic mistakes, or misinterpretations — is the indisputable "truth" that Obama is someone whose honesty should not — should never — be questioned. (Whether in regards to his private life or to his political plans for America's future.)
[Update: As it happens, we would learn in 2012 (over four years after Obama was first a candidate and over three years after he entered the White House) that a "New Book Raises Questions About Obama's Memoir" (The New York Times' Michael Shear) and that, indeed, it turns out that Obama's memories were a "fantasy (like most of the President's own memoir)" (The Daily Mail). Adds Toby Harnden: "'Barack Obama: The Story' by David Maraniss catalogues dozens of instances in which Obama deviated significantly from the truth in his book 'Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance'. The 641-page book punctures the carefully-crafted narrative of Obama’s life."]

[Moreover, as Lloyd Billingsley writes, there does seem to be quite a number of snags, significant or not (the reader will have to decide that for himself), in the former Barry Soetoro's past:

Clinton factotum George Stephanopoulos, one year ahead [at Columbia University in the early 1980s], and Matthew Cooper of Newsweek, a year behind, had no memory of the future president there. On that score, the pair had plenty of company. 

Wayne Allyn Root, the Libertarian Party candidate for vice-president in 2008, was in Obama’s 1983 Columbia political science and pre-law class, the identical course of study, and graduated on the same day. As Root told Matt Welch of Reason,  he “never met him in my life, don’t know anyone who ever met him.” 

In similar style, class of ’83 Columbia grads included a group of  25 lawyers, a doctor, several engineers and other professionals living in Israel. “Not one of us remembers Barack Obama . . . from our undergrad years, nor do we know anyone else who does,” explained Judy Maltz.]

When you think about it, it might be less worrying that some do not believe Obama was born in the United States (because of the circumstances linked to his entire childhood, much of it abroad) than that some are utterly convinced he must be born in the United States (because the Chicago pol is allegedly a sainted figure who can do, who can say no evil, who is incapable of or of lying or of falsifying documents). Again, remember the desires of some of his followers who want(ed) the constitution to be changed, only so Obama could win one election after another and end up, in one way or another and in the best of all possible outcomes, as (de facto if not de jure) president-for-life? Let me ask everybody a simple question: Who is the truly terrifying fanatic, here?

Moreover, in the past two or three election cycles, there have been (entirely valid) questions about the place of birth of… (get this) white male Republican candidates!

Imagine, if in 2008, someone raised questions about John McCain, pointing out that he spent a lot of his youth outside the United States. Indeed, it turns out that the senator from Arizona was born in Panama. What if, in 2016, someone raised questions about Ted Cruz, pointing out that he seems to have spent a lot of his youth north of the border? And, indeed, it turns out that the senator from Texas was born in Canada. (Still, it turns out that both men qualified, or qualify, as natural-born citizens and thus as U.S. presidents — as, presumably would… Barack Obama (!), even if he indeed had been born abroad!)

There have been rumors that Obama may have attended college as a "foreign student" and that his book editor listed him as born in Kenya. Even if they are piddling issues, occasionally proven false, the point has nothing to with Obama per se. (As Breitbart states, "It is evidence — not of the President’s foreign origin, but that Barack Obama’s public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.") The point is that the mainstream media never bothered to devote even a minute to investigate the issue (or the strategy behind the different public personas); only new online media (Breitbart and Snopes) did so.
 
3) Here comes the kicker: the so-called "Birther" charge (whether brought by a Democrat or a Republican) was never a charge leveled primarily at a man called Barack Obama or, for that matter, against a member of a minority or a person of a particular race.

It was a charge against the media. 

Indeed, as in 2) above, the "birther" charge was, and is, an entirely justifiable charge against the mainstream media. It was never about birth certificates per se. It was about the double standards that the MSM demonstrate again and again, first, between a Republican and a Democrat, and, second, between the other members of the Donkey Party and the media's preferred (i.e., its "dream") candidate.

(See Instapundit for a myriad of examples of why Glenn Reynolds refers to reporters and journalists as Democrats with bylines; or, as I call them, the fellow travelers in the (self-serving) drama queen view of America and the world.)
 
Recall Hillary Clinton referring to the SNL sketch journalists asking "Barack" if he is comfortable and needs another pillow. Here was a candidate (whatever the color of his skin) with, again, a foreign father and with long years of his childhood spent abroad (oh, and by the way, running a campaign extolling transparency): why not have a reporter or two (briefly) ask this person to (quickly) prove his credentials for the Oval Office (once and for all) — y'know, in the process of challenging politicians on their merits)?

4) The fact that the "Birther" issue was an (entirely justifiable) attack (by a Democrat or a Republican) on the mainstream media offering undeniable proof of its double standards is the very reason that it was—deliberately—turned into a scandal of humongous proportions depicting unspeakable hatred spewed by vicious packs of deranged, loony, and fanatic Neanderthals.

It was not by accident that the title of my "lengthy, in-depth, and dispassionate examination of the facts, of the nutjobs, and of Obama's youth" was The JournoList Issue No One Is Bringing Up. The reason I keep referring to the "alleged" and to the "so-called" "Birther" issue in quotation marks is that it is an entirely fabricated story (or narrative, to use the MSM's preferred expression), by members of the mainstream media itself, with an entirely fabricated cast of nasty and dangerous villains, consisting of mobs of zealous trouble-makers and despicable enemies of the people. 

The ensuing pearl-clutching "omigod-don't-tell-us-that-you-are-one-of-those-racist-clods?!" attitude was, and is, in no way a defense of Obama or the occupant of the White House; it was, and it is, a defense of the mainstream media.

It was and is certainly not a gallant and high-principled attack on hate and bigotry, in defense of a minority member sitting in the White House.  

It was and is a shameful, a disgusting, and an un-American attempt to shut down debate by shaming anyone wishing to take a deeper look into the biggest single piece of evidence exposing the MSM's (bogus) credentials of neutrality and impartiality.

Great minds think alike: Pope Francis Asks to See Michael Moore in Private and Tells Him that "Capitalism is a sin"

"Capitalism is a sin" Pope Francis said to the director of Capitalism during a visit to the Vatican. In the Valeurs Actuelles weekly, Amaury Brelet reported that

The far left American director and the pontiff, who met a few weeks ago at the Vatican, seem to share, without surprise, the same radical opinions.
 
Great minds think alike

Michael Moore spoke with Pope Francis a few weeks ago at the Vatican. The far-right American director even detailed their interview while a guest on the show "Late Night with Seth Meyers". "I went to the general audience and asked to speak to me privately…"

In French:

Le réalisateur américain d’extrême gauche et le souverain pontife, qui se sont rencontrés il y a quelques semaines au Vatican, semblent partager, sans surprise, les mêmes opinions radicales.

Les grands esprits se rencontrent. 

Michael Moore s’est entretenu avec le pape François, il y a quelques semaines au Vatican. Le réalisateur américain d’extrême gauche a même raconté en détails leur entrevue alors qu’il était invité du show “ Late Night avec Seth Meyers ”. « Je me suis rendu à l’audience générale, et il a demandé à me parler en privé... »

Flashback: In an interview with a foreign-language newspaper never disclosed by America's MSM, Michael Moore, the director of Sicko and Capitalism (A Love Story), admits in so many words — "Dude, I am on Marx's Tomb!" — to being nothing less than a Marxist

Update — George Neumayr:

James Grein said what the bishops [of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)] wouldn’t:

“It is not Francis’s church; it is Jesus Christ’s church.”

PS : Bienvenue à la Ferme de Marguerite