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Elite opinion going nuts

James Taub of Foreign Policy Magazine says it all: “It’s time for the elites to rise up against the ignorant masses”.

The issues are not between left and right he says, but between the wise and knowing elites and the angry know nothings who voted  for Brexit and who will he fears vote for Trump.

 

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Given Mr. Taub’s description  of what ails the masses, it is to be expected that they are in revolt. He writes:

 

The issue, at bottom, is globalization. Brexit, Trump, the National Front, and so on show that political elites have misjudged the depth of the anger at global forces and thus the demand that someone, somehow, restore the status quo ante. It may seem strange that the reaction has come today rather than immediately after the economic crisis of 2008, but the ebbing of the crisis has led to a new sense of stagnation. With prospects of flat growth in Europe and minimal income growth in the United States, voters are rebelling against their dismal long-term prospects. And globalization means culture as well as economics: Older people whose familiar world is vanishing beneath a welter of foreign tongues and multicultural celebrations are waving their fists at cosmopolitan elites.

If my long term prospects were ‘dismal’, to use his words, I too would revolt.

The schism we see opening before us is not just about policies, but about reality. The Brexit forces won because cynical leaders were prepared to cater to voters’ paranoia, lying to them about the dangers of immigration and the costs of membership in the EU.

It is customary in argument to assert that the view of reality held by one’s opponents must be wrong. Usually left wingers assert that opposition is informed by wrong attitudes, ideologies, and values. It never occurs to writers like Taub that the systematic cover-up by British police and social workers of Islamic rape culture in Rotherham has come home to roost, as it were. It never seems to occur to them that the price of imposing political correctness – which is not to perceive or speak about what is in front of one’s nose – is that the pressure must build up to the point of explosion. Through miscalculation, the Tory government handed the masses a clearly worded question that asked them in effect if they wanted

  • to be irrevocably committed to unlimitable immigration and
  • the permanent subordination of their political institutions to un-elected and unaccountable foreign ones.

Despite many material advantages of the current arrangements, the people answered ‘no’. Now the elites are going bonkers. Go figure.

 

 

what if Mateen had been a Nazi?

The discourse on the Islamic gay terrorist in the Orlando night club is proving to be the usual Rorschach test of political beliefs: gun control, Islam, immigration, homophobia.

To those obsessed with the absence of American gun control, I have a few simple questions:

What if a man claiming to be a follower of Adolf Hitler had done the same thing, in the name of cleansing the species of decadence?

Would anyone give a damn whether he had used an AR-15 rather than a Kalashnikov? Would the issue be considered the lack of suitable gun control?

No, obviously. Gun control speaks to means but not the motivation. No amount of European gun control prevented the massacre and attacks in Paris.

And if he had turned out to be a self-conflicted gay Nazi, would it make a difference to anyone’s estimate of the man and the crime?

It would elicit the same response:  deviant or minority sexuality in both Islamic and National Socialist ideologies is so savagely repressed by one’s society and one’s culture, that the incompatibility between self and ideology causes explosions of rage.

I have been appalled and amazed, even at my advanced stage of cynicism, by the extent to which the discourse is shifted by liberals to things about which nothing can really be done, such as gun control in the US, to things about which everything can be done: changing our views on the real nature of Islam.

More and more I understand what Churchill went through in the 1930s, as he railed against the Nazi menace. People in the ruling class did not want to know about Hitler. They blamed the barking dog for provoking the behaviour of the wolf pack, which was hunting the sheep in the meadow.

Certain menaces are so existential, and challenge so many assumptions of the comfortable liberal world view, that it is easier to talk about gun control than Muslim control.

Islam is not a religion; it is a totalitarian social ideology.

 

Islam at work for Trump

The apostasy of our intellectuals and politicians will shortly be on display. The recent massacre of over 50 people in an Orlando gay bar by a Muslim, born in America, and incidentally a registered Democrat, will bring forth the usual nonsense that Islam is the religion of peace.

Yes, for those who have already submitted, Islam promises the peace that passes all understanding. Brain death awaits them, or has already reduced them to mechanistic obedience to the mind killer which is Islam.

As a friend remarked:

Well I guess that puts the Trump presidency into concrete. Done deal.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has written several books on here experience growing up as a Somali woman Muslim. She is waging the fight to get western liberals to understand that what we see in the papers is not an aberration, it is Islam itself. I take this extract from her latest, called Heretic.

After describing how her half sister lectured her for hours and sought to involve the extended family in having Ayaan sent away for having questioned the need for prayer five times a day, Hirsi Ali writes:

This illustrates how the practice of commanding right and forbidding wrong functions in Islamic society. Debate and doubt are intolerable,deserving of censure, with the questioner reduced to silence even ins command me to do right and to forbid me to do – or even think – wrong.

This is only part of the larger truth about Islam. It is almost always the immediate family that starts the persecution of freethinkers, of those who would ask questions or propose something new.Commanding right and forbidding wrong begins at home.From there it moves out into the community at large.Totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century had to work quite hard to persuade family members  to denounce one another to the authorities . The power of the Muslim system is that the authorities do not need to be involved. Social control begins at home.

The constant personal and intellectual unease that many of the Muslim students at my Harvard seminar felt with any discussion of the political organization of the Islamic world is directly connected to this over arching concept  of commanding right and forbidding wrong.

-at page 154

OmarMateen2-640x480“No one could have predicted this,” Islamic Society of Central Florida official says: http://cbsn.ws/21vPMY2

On the contrary, murders by Muslims of others whom they believe to committing wrong are enjoined, ordained, and commanded by the Prophet.

Vegans threaten death to apostate restaurant owners

formervegans

 

Entitlement and hypocrisy come together this week in the story Time reported:

The husband-and-wife owners of famous vegan restaurant group Cafe Gratitude are under fire after a group of animal rights activists discovered last week that the couple was raising, slaughtering, and eating animals at their Northern California farm, named Be Love.

Possibly this is all a part of the fine American art of using adversity to promote one’s products.

Certainly it illustrates something C.S.Lewis adverted to a long time ago: the tendency of some to be cruel to those close to them in order to demonstrate their concern for those in the outer circles of the human range of compassion. C.S.Lewis said, as Christian has ever maintained, that the job of man is to love one’s neighbour. From the habits of loving one’s neighbour we may eventually come to broaden the circle of our compassion to others further away from us. There is a particular kind of human who thinks it is right to do harm to those close by in the name of anything or anyone that shows their higher moral concern: starving Africans, the future, the proletariat, the master race, non-human life, Gaia, the Holy Catholic Church. There is no lack of categories of concern different from the slob who shares your house, the actual neighbour, the people of (for instance) Fort McMurray, who have just been burned out of town.

Threatening to kill the owners of your favourite vegan restaurant because they have gone apostate by eating meat: how many sins and vanities does that expose?

The owners of the restaurant speak for themselves:

“We started to observe nature and what we saw is that nature doesn’t exist without animals,” Matthew Engelhart told the Hollywood Reporter last week after animal rights activists dug up and circulated blog entries from spring 2015 from the farm’s website, including photos of a freezer full of pastured beef, jars of gravy and Matthew enjoying a hamburger, with posts on their “transition” into meat products after nearly 40 years of vegetarianism.

Another study that came out this past week was a survey of people according to dietary habits.

A new University of Graz study concludes that vegetarians are more often ill and have a lower quality of living than meat-eaters. According to the German press release, vegetarians “have cancer and heart attacks more often”. The release also says that they show more psychological disorders than meat eaters. Consequently, the report writes, they are a greater burden on the health care system.

The scientists examined a total of 1320 persons who were divided up into 4 groups of 330 persons each. All groups were comparable with respect to gender, age, and socio-economic status. The study also accounted for smoking and physical activity. Also the BMI was within the normal range for all four groups (22.9 – 24.9). The only thing that really was different among the four groups was the diet. The four groups were: 1) vegetarians, 2) meat-eaters with lots of fruit and veggies, 3) little meat-eaters and 4) big meat-eaters. More than three quarters of the participants were women (76.4%).

Vegetarians plagued by significantly more chronic illnesses

The press release states that the results contradict the common cliché that meat-free diets are healthier. Vegetarians have twice as many allergies as big meat-eaters do (30.6% to 16.7%) and they showed 166% higher cancer rates (4.8% to 1.8%). Moreover the scientists found that vegans had a 150% higher rate of heart attacks (1.5% to 0.6%). In total the scientists looked at 18 different chronic illnesses. Compared to the big meat-eaters, vegetarians were hit harder in 14 of the 18 illnesses (78%) which included asthma, diabetes, migraines and osteoporosis [1, p.4, Table 3].

The Medical University of Graz confirms the findings of the University of Hildesheim: More frequent psychological disorders among vegetarians, the press release states.

The roots of anxiety and depression?

In the analysis, the University of Graz found that vegetarians were also twice as likely to suffer for anxiety or depressions than big meat eaters (9.4% to 4.5%). That result was confirmed by the University of Hildesheim, which found that vegetarians suffered significantly more from depressions, anxiety, psychosomatic complaints and eating disorders [2]. The U of Graz scientists also found that vegetarians are impacted more by ilnessses and visit the doctor more frequently [1, p. 3, Table 2].

Big meat-eaters were also found to have a “significantly better quality of life in all categories”, the study found. The four categories examined were: physical and psychological health, social relationships and environment-related life quality [1, p. 5, Table 4].

 

The study did not delve into the question whether vegetarians were more inclined to depression, neurosis and political leftism than meat eaters. It has been my observation that they tend to be. Vegetarians are part of that crowd of western Eloi whose over-developed super egos punish them for the pleasures of existence.

As to the apostate former vegan restaurant owners, their own moral posturing may have brought down the wrath of the disappointed vegans upon them. Try to read this without gagging:

The Engelharts spawned an entire industry with a carefully marketed message of peace, love and sharing, which includes a sister vegan Mexican restaurant, Gracias Madre, in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The couple have written several books, including Sacred Commerce: Business as a Path of Awakening and Kindred Spirit: Fulfilling Love’s Promise. Their personal website is named Eternal Presence and references the board game they created in 2004, called The Abounding River Board Game, which was on every table in their San Francisco flagship; and which they said would train players to embrace “an unfamiliar view of Being Abundant” and develop a “spiritual foundation” for looking at money.

It is hard to tell who in this story is more to blame.

Abu Sayyaf and the “experts”: crime not jihad

Mark SInger

Mark Singer from his Linked In page

Mark Singer, director of business intelligence for the Manila office of Pacific Strategies and Assessments Inc., which closely tracks Abu Sayyaf, thinks that jihad has nothing to do with their kidnappings, extortions and beheadings. I wonder why.

This is the narrative we are all supposed to accept:

“It is a manifestation of their willingness to do this (kidnap, threaten and behead prisoners)  to leverage their criminal activities. They are first and foremost a kidnap group,” the security and risk analyst said

“The black flags and the rhetoric reinforce their claims, but they are not ideologically driven. They are driven totally by criminal intent and kidnap for ransom.”

 

“Driven totally by criminal intent and kidnap for ransom”.  Rubbish. Bandits with religious or ideological justification are different from mere bandits. What makes Muslim terrorism different from mere banditry is that Islam authorizes by them religion to smite the infidel, to waylay them, to behead them. These are not bandits who rob banks “because that’s where the money is.”

Yes, they are criminals. But the particular form of criminality is a cultural expression of Islam. Where there are Muslims, so there will be jihad. This is a statistical correlation, not a one for one correspondence. I would go further and assert that it is an ineluctable consequence of being inspired by the prophet Mohammed to do as he commanded his disciples to do.

The contact webpage of Mark Singer’s employers is http://www.psagroup.com/contact/ You can use that contact point to communicate with Pacific Strategies and Assesments, who, judged by their backgrounds,look like serious and responsible people.

Mr. Singer is entitled to his opinions but you may wish to express your concerns, as politely as possible, that the quality of their advice is measured by the quality of their spokesmen.

Race and IQ: changing my mind

This is an official announcement: I have changed my mind about something. Or maybe it is more accurate to say that new evidence is opening my mind to other possibilities – as it should. For the longest time I was persuaded, on rational grounds, that the gap in the United States between whites and black IQ scores was a largely genetic issue (approximately 70-80 percent) . After all, better scientists than I argued this way in The Bell Curve. Richard Lynn also argued this way, on possibly weaker statistical grounds.

The success of a couple of generations of children of African immigrants in the United States has damaged the credibility of theories predicated on inherited IQ.

I cite Chanda Chisala in the Unz Review:

 

The fact that black immigrants to the United States have shown achievements that are superior to native black Americans has been a phenomenon studied since at least the 1970′s. At first it was just the Caribbean blacks who were a subject of this unexpected outcome. As black Africans kept immigrating into the US, they showed even higher levels of achievement than the native blacks. Many scholars theorized on the reasons for these differences, from Thomas Sowell’s proposal that this disproved the validity of discrimination against native blacks as an explanation for their underachievement (Sowell, 1978), to other scholars who suggested that these immigrants were just the most highly driven members of their home countries as evidenced by their willingness to migrate to a foreign country (Butcher, 1990).

What most of these theories failed to predict was that the children of these immigrants would also show exceptional achievements, especially academically. It is only in recent years, as the immigrants have stayed long enough to produce a sufficiently high number of offspring, that it has been observed that they are over-represented among high academic achievers, especially when compared to native blacks, particularly at very elite institutions. What has been missed in the IQ debate is the full logical implication of these achievements: they have effectively nullified any arguments for a racial evolutionary explanation of the well-known IQ test score gap between blacks and whites. Even more fatal for the racial hereditarian side of the debate has been the corroborating data of school children performance in the UK, particularly when the black Africans are divided into their respective nationalities and tribal ethnicities, as reported in the latter section of this article.

The article is long but worth reading for those who concern themselves with such issues.

 

Thomas Sowell, a thinker and researcher at the Hoover Institute at Harvard, has argued that American blacks adopted the culture of the Scotch-Irish crackers who surrounded them. The book is called Black Rednecks and White Liberals, published in 2005. Thus a good deal of what is blamed on black ghetto culture is ascribed to ne’er do well hillbillies from whom the African slaves picked up ideas of work, child rearing, and social display. Sowell’s argument says that African Americans should not be indulged by white liberals in what he thinks is a loser culture; whether that culture arose from contact with rednecks or whether it arose from other causes is not ultimately of vital interest to Sowell. He is concerned of the use made by white liberals of American blacks.

“A crucial fact about white liberals must be kept in mind: they are not simply in favor of blacks in general. Their solicitude is poured out  for blacks as victims, blacks as welfare mothers, criminals, political activists against the larger society, as well as those blacks who serve as general counter-cultural symbols against the larger society.” (p.57)

Sowell’s concern has been the development of a black identity fetish since the 1960s, where being authentically “black” has been associated with low achievement, where earning and culture have been depicted as “acting white”. Harry Belafonte, a Caribbean immigrant to the United States, turned  on Colin Powell, another successful Caribbean black immigrant, who had been Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff of the US military, by calling him a “house nigger”.

Sowell maintains a strongly “culturalist” explanation of apparent racial differences. The interesting thing about Chanda Chisala’s article and the evidence it cites is that we have a much stronger basis for considering cultural explanations to be better grounded now than the genetic one, for supposedly racial IQ differences. This is a cause for hope, perhaps, that some things can be changed for the better.

All Trump, all the time,,,Part 10

From time to time something so apt comes along the only correct response is to block and copy and bow deeply in the direction of its author, in this case, Rebecca Bynum, who writes for and edits New English Review.

rebeccabynum

Insurrection in the G.O.P., Or, The Wisdom of the Trump Voter

by Rebecca Bynum (April 2016)

“The Republican electorate is not a bunch of completely ignorant fools. We know who Donald Trump is and we’re going to use Donald Trump to either take over the G.O.P. or blow it up.”
— Steve from Temecula, Calif.

“You’re gonna change or I’m a gonna leave.”
— Hank Williams

Many conservative pundits have weighed in on Donald Trump’s candidacy for President. National Review hates him and his supporters with the white hot heat of a thousand supernovas and vow to fight him to the bitter end. Pat Buchanan is more reflective and, having more experience in the political world, more sanguine at the prospect of a President Trump, as is Newt Gingrich.

Meanwhile, voters are anxiously exhorted by G.O.P. stalwarts to “stand for conservative principles,” and to reject Mr. Trump. But the fact is, those “conservative principles” have covered a multitude of sins and the voters know it. For the G.O.P., the term seems to mean “never having to say you’re sorry.” True, the Bush 43 Presidency was a disaster, especially the second term, including the Light-Unto-the-Muslim Nations democracy project in Iraq and Afghanistan costing trillions of dollars we could ill-afford and thousands of young lives with tens of thousands maimed, coupled with exploding government bureaucracies, the hollowing out of our industrial base, millions of refugees and illegal immigrants straining local governments to the breaking point – and never mind that what Bush ran on and what voters voted for was exactly the opposite – smaller government, rule of law on immigration, no nation building, etc., etc. Now, the Republican Party expects us to forget all that and place the same people who got us into this mess back into power. Really? They’ve been rolling out the same platform since Reagan. The world has moved on.

One of the most interesting aspects of the current election is the fact that the main stream media no longer controls what news we see and hear, so they’ve found themselves in the unenviable position of playing catch-up to try to understand the issues motivating Trump voters, especially after having glossed over the immigration crisis for the last 30 years. And they still seem to think that by disallowing the long-overdue national conversation on Islam, the country can continue importing over 200,000 Muslims a year from every third world country on earth and nothing will happen (except perhaps the occasional terror attack, the prospect of which the public takes much more seriously than the press seems to believe is warranted). Don’t you know you have a better chance of being struck by lightning? And besides, Muslims are part of the American fabric. They’re in our military and police forces. In other words, there is nothing we can do about the ever growing number of Muslims in our country. The US must become just like Europe or risk being seen as impolite and be excluded from all the best international meetings.

Then along came Donald Trump. He kicked open the door of political correctness on several fronts and the country is already breathing a collective sigh of relief. This naturally alarms the media, the Democrats and the Republican establishment, causing them all to attack Trump mercilessly day in and day out for being crude. However, even with violent protesters attempting to stop this candidate from speaking (possibly instigated by the Clinton campaign), a door has been opened that no Republican establishment man can shut. This election is not the end of it.

After the Brussels attacks, Ted Cruz desperately tried to find a stronger policy position on domestic Muslim terror (increased policing of Muslim neighborhoods), but he does not get to the heart of the problem. Just how much policing, surveillance and ever multiplying security measures should be implemented so as to be assured of the great privilege of hosting ever larger and more aggressive Muslim populations? Apparently the sky is the limit, no matter what the cost – both for Republicans and Democrats.

Trump is the only candidate proposing the one obvious solution – limit Muslim immigration. Naturally, he was immediately savaged by, the media, the Democrats, the other Republican presidential candidates and G.O.P. leaders who continue to piously inform us that “we believe in freedom of religion” apparently no matter what that “religion” actually is. Nothing can be done except to turn our nation into an ever more oppressive surveillance state. Don’t bother pointing out that the reason why we still have no strategy to deal with 1) Islamic terrorism, 2) the crisis in the Middle East, 3)the immigration crisis in Europe and 4) growing Islamization in many pockets around the country where Muslims are doing what they always do – impose their norms and requirements on the host population rather than assimilating, our political leaders still refuse to deal with subject of Islam. We’re supposed to believe that regardless of what has happened for over a thousand years wherever large numbers of Muslims migrate, that somehow, America will be exempt from the inevitable chaos to follow.

It has been especially embarrassing to watch American journalists lecturing the Belgians following the recent attack there, implying that the blame should be placed on the native people for the crime of having poor integration policies. Rather, we must understand those Muslim immigrants are simply engaging in that most Islamic of all activities, jihad. Where there are Muslims, there will be jihad, which should be defined as the struggle to advance the cause of Islam, by both violent and non-violent means, until Islam dominates. According to recent polls, 69% of Republicans, 55% of Independents and 39% of Democrats back Trump’s common sense proposal to halt Muslim immigration, at least temporarily. The media simply cannot comprehend this. What Clinton and Sanders call bigotry and hate, the American people view as basic common sense because common sense it is.

The fact is, we are enmeshed in a war waged by civilians upon civilians and potential terrorists are streaming in unimpeded through our southern border in addition to being brought in legally through our refugee and visa programs. Even with a perfect screening process, we can never be guaranteed the children of these immigrants and refugees will not turn to jihad in the future.

If George W. Bush had had the intelligence to understand his first and most basic responsibility to the American people, he would have begun restricting Muslim immigration immediately after 9/11, secured the southern border and stepped up FBI surveillance of mosques (far fewer then than now). We couldn’t afford and did not need another bloated and redundant bureaucracy such as the Department of Homeland Security. Bush could have simply expanded the FBI and increased communication between it and the CIA. Period.

Donald Trump also sees civilizational jihad as a huge part of the problem and he is the only candidate to do so. I also believe he would understand the wisdom of allowing the sectarian and ethnic divisions in Muslim lands to fight it out on their own terms. There are some things we did not cause and cannot control, but if we must go in, we must get out quickly. Those of us who supported the Afghanistan and Iraq wars certainly beleived there would be a quick withdrawal. No one signed up for 15 years of nation building – no one. Yet the G.O.P. doesn’t want to allow dissent on this most crucial issue. Lindsay Graham and John McCain would have involved us in endless conflict in the Middle East if they had the power to do so. Hillary Clinton is not far behind in her enthusiasm for “regime change” overseas (including replacing Mubarak with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt), heedless of the chaos to follow as Muslim nations inevitably devolve into their constituent tribes along sectarian lines – see Libya, Yemen and Syria.

After spending trillions of dollars on two fruitless conflicts, Trump proposes going in only when necessary, bombing our enemies, smashing their infrastructure, killing their fighters, but then leaving them to their own devises and equally important, not arming them to the hilt on the way out. General Powell’s Pottery Barn metaphor (if you break it, you buy it), requiring us to stay and rebuild these countries’ infrastructure (even using the military to pick up their trash), just doesn’t wash with the American public. Muslim societies don’t belong to us and we don’t owe them a thing. The Bush Administration, that is, the establishment G.O.P. who want their old jobs back, never understood this, but the voters and Donald Trump understand this just fine. Take the oil? Hell yes! This is war!

Trump also understands immigration is a jobs issue – especially for African Americans. Trump has proposed a pause on legal immigration and a complete end to illegal immigration. His supporters believe he will keep his word and “build that wall” along our southern border. In this, voters see the G.O.P. and their ill-fated plan to court Hispanic voters (with Marco Rubio as the future of the party) as completely out of touch with reality.

In addition, as Trump correctly points out, the Clinton-Bush-Obama era trade deals have decimated the industrial heart of the country. Yet, apparently G.O.P. voters are supposed to smile and cheerfully support “free trade” knowing their candidates are in the pocket of a group of big donors who always get what they want and what they want is cheap labor whatever the costs to the country. The fact that Americans now have plentiful cheap electronics, doesn’t actually make up for the fact that we have no jobs left to pay for them. Donald Trump understands this. He knows the value of good paying jobs for the stability of families and the self-respect and confidence of the entire nation, but until his campaign began, this vital subject has been off the table for Republicans.

In this, the businessman from Queens understands the American working people better than Harvard man from Texas or the mailman’s son from Ohio. He speaks in plain English to describe the incompetence, and yes, the stupidity of those currently in power, who could not have harmed our country any more if they had had outright malicious intent. Voters know that if things don’t change soon, we may not have much of a country left to bequeath to our children.

It’s not just trade deals which require re-negotiation, but defense agreements also. What we have today are mainly the extensions of agreements reached after WWII, made when we were at the very height of our power and stature as a nation. Unfortunately, we are not that country anymore. Contrary to the assertions of Mrs. Clinton, NATO is not a sacred cow. The Cold War is over and we need new alliances to deal with the current threat – we cannot do it alone. Clinton wants us to feel comfortable in the same old ruts, but renegotiation of these agreements as Trump has proposed would free up resources and place us in a better position to defend America from the threats we face today.

Mr. Trump has operated on the highest levels in business and society for many years. Those who know him personally assure us of his level-headed, charming manner in that setting. So who do Americans want to enter these critical negotiations on their behalf – the inflexible, moralizing schoolmaster (Cruz), Mr. Rogers (Kasich), or master negotiator, Donald J. Trump? Gee that’s easy.

The American people are astounded by the sheepish behavior of the Europeans in response to the threat of terror. Those candlelight vigils look more like funerals for their nations, as if they realize they are already beaten. The Muslim threat has grown and grown in the heart of their ancient capitals due to the abject failure of their clueless political leaders. Few rise up to demand the radical change necessary; rather, hobbled by political correctness, the majority seems to limp toward doom. By backing Donald Trump, Americans are demonstrating to the world we are not defeated and that Europe can do the same – throw the bums out!

One of the latest G.O.P. tactics to defeat Trump comes in the form of criticism of his rhetoric, as if American women were all Miss Pittypat reaching for the smelling salts whenever a slightly off-color remark leaves his lips. On the contrary, American women voters choose Trump because they want someone who will protect their children by whatever means necessary. And the populace applauds him for sticking by his campaign manager after he was charged with battery (battery!) for pulling a female reporter away from the candidate. The right to abortion is settled law and a actually more or less a non-issue.

Donald Trump may not be perfect, but at least he will clean house and a Trump administration won’t be a repeat of the feckless Bush 43. The country need fresh, realistic thinking and that is what Donald Trump promises.

_____________________________________________

Rebecca Bynum’s latest book is The Real Nature of Religion, published by New English Review Press.

 

The violence at Trump rallies

For years, in the Obama regime, naturally, blacks have been attacking whites and Asians in sudden but premeditated assaults, which came to be called “the knockout game”. You can read all about it here. Have you just heard about it? In that case you may have been dwelling on the planet of liberal media.

But one Trump supporter attacks a black agitator being removed from a Trump rally, and we have a national crisis of violence? No, what we have is a member of the white race punching a member of the liberal mascot victim group, American blacks. That is the crisis. Liberal victim groups are sacred! It is the only sacredness admitted by the Left to exist. And when whites, the most despised social group in Obama’s America, finally summon the courage to react to anti-white racism and discrimination, to the flooding of their country with uncontrolled immigration, to the decline of their living standards, and most important of all, to the endless attacks on their moral integrity for the crime of simply being white, well, folks, that is a a crisis of the most serious kind in the hegemony of leftist thought.

Here is a link to Ezra Klein’s heavy breathing on Trump’s “ideology of violence”. Klein writes:

 

The topic was protesters, and Trump’s frustration was clear. “They’re being politically correct the way they take them out,” he sighed. “Protesters, they realize there are no consequences to protesting anymore. There used to be consequences. There are none anymore.”

“Our country has to toughen up folks,” he continued. “We have to toughen up. These people are bringing us down. They are bringing us down. These people are so bad for our country, you have no idea.”

This is more than an aside; this is the core of Trump’s ideology. The protesters who interrupted his rally, the political correctness that kept the police from cracking their skulls, the press that takes the hippies’ side — this is why America has stopped being great. We were strong, and we were tough, and we didn’t take this kind of shit from anybody. And now we are weak, and we are scared, and we take this kind of shit from everybody.

I know intimately the tactics of the Left. They demonize, since rational opposition to their views is impossible. They never argue; they only seek one’s social exclusion. They incite the violence and then blame the victim of their violence for causing it. Trump had to shut down a rally in Chicago because of the threat of violence from a Left-wing organization, funded by Soros, yet that lickspittle National Post is blaming Trump.

03-15-16cle

 

This will continue and intensify until Trump wins the election. Make no mistake what this election is about: it is the reaction of the white race (and all other sensible people, but whites especially)  to its systematic denigration and exclusion from its place in the moral universe. The Left wants a racial fight? It has got one, and it is going to get more vicious, because it MUST be won, for the future of the American people. America will not long survive if its founding political culture is  destroyed by the destruction of the white race. Since the Left insists there is something particularly evil in being white, I am allowed, and Americans are allowed, to insist there is some particular virtue in the political order it upholds. Race-ism is a grievous moral distortion, but as a short-hand way of saying it, the political culture that made America great will not long survive the moral extinction planned for whites by the political Left. The attack on political correctness by Trump is an attack on everything that is wrong with America under Obama: of which the ideology of Saul Alinksy, Michael Moore, and Black Lives Matter are but exemplars.

You wanted this fight, you commie nihilists. You got one. Let liberals deplore all they want. This is a fight that must be allowed to play out.

Mrs. Dalwhinnie is pissed off

And not at me, for a change. No, nor at Gian Ghomeshi, the man who used to host  the leading morning show on CBC radio. She is pissed off at the women who testified against him. As their case has fallen apart under questioning, it appears they have lied, colluded, and compromized themselves hugely by having sexual relations with the odious Mr. Ghomeshi, after the alleged violent acts he committed against them. Mrs Dalwhinnie feels that her sex has been let down by the conniving creeps who testified against him. Apparently Christie Blatchford feels the same way.

Whatever else, the courtroom at Old City Hall, where the sex assault trial of Jian Ghomeshi ended Thursday, was generally a lousy place to be for a woman.

Everywhere you looked, there were women being caught in lies or omissions on the witness stand and then resorting to justifications for their evasive conduct taken straight from the therapist’s couch or latest self-help book; women being escorted in and out of the courtroom by protectors from the victim-witness office; women being soothed, IRL and online by their supporters, who took to labelling certain blogposts or tweets with “trigger warnings,” lest, God forbid, victims of sexual assault should accidentally wander onto a dangerous opinion or factual situation and be re-traumatized.

Tyler Anderson/National Post Jian Ghomeshi arrives at the courthouse for the final day of his sexual assault trial in Toronto, Thursday, Feb. 11, 2016.

It was akin to being a member, by virtue of gender alone, of an over-delicate, slightly feeble-minded citizenry in need of perpetual deference and protection both.

God bless you, Blatchford, for saying that. Her video at the same site says the the women were duplicitous, lied, and misled the police. Worse, the environment at the police department has been overtaken by PC, where women are treated as a slightly feeble-minded citizenry in need of perpetual deference and protection.

I do not know where this feminist thing will end, but so far as I have ever been able to make out, it is and has been  a cry for privilege, for the right to compete but the entitlement to a better outcome, and above all, to be treated as morally superior.

Once, decades ago, I had one of those strange dinner gatherings that one can have in one’s thirties  where people who had never met before were at table together. A girlfriend of a friend of a friend started on the usual feminist rant: the full litany of “we are oppressed, have always been oppressed by males” and she quite clearly did not have the least expectation that anyone would dare to say a word against her. A older lady had taken out knitting as this was going on, and she stopped in a stitch and asked, fixing the young woman with an eye:

“So, are you saying then, that women are morally superior to men?”

A silence fell, as the young lady had the wit to realize that she could not go on without making precisely the kind of claim she said she abhorred when it was done to her sex.

And that pretty well sums up the entire history of feminism: the claim that women are morally superior beings to men. Nothing I have observed of women’s behaviour compared to men’s would lead me, or anyone else for that matter, to that conclusion. And so I no more defer to women than I do to men, other than on the basis of character, age, class, rank, infirmity and the myriad real things by which humans are distinguished.

As C.S.Lewis once observed, you might go to a woman for compassion but you would almost always go to a man for justice.

 

Toeing the line: such are the joys of a controlled broadcasting sector

One of my animating passions is the importance of the Internet for freedom of expression. You do not have to get your blogging licence renewed annually for $56.00 from the CRTC (just send your money by credit card to the Minister of Finance – they make it so easy and convenient to pay). Nor do you have to conform to the CRTC’s broadcasting exemption order, which gives you the right to “broadcast” across the Internet without a licence if you conform to its provisions.

As a blogger you do not belong to the regulated universe of broadcasting. You sit down to the computer and write, post pictures, upload videos, and voilà, your blog is ready for however many or few people can be attracted to it.

Broadcasting is a different matter. From the beginning, broadcasting has been heavily regulated by the state for cultural, economic and political purposes, everywhere in the world. The original justification was that broadcasters used precious radio spectrum, which is a public resource,  and that signal channels needed to be assigned to particular uses and users so that interference would be prevented.

But once the hand of regulation was laid on broadcasting, the grip has never ceased nor its hold lessened.

Take for example, the leading issue of our time: the role of Islam in our future. Europe has been convulsed with a refugee migration, numbering in the millions, of young males who have been taught by their religion and society that they are conquerors of women and that non-Muslims are fair game for assault and rape. Mixing young Muslim men from unreformed societies into the modern world of Europe: what could possibly go wrong?

Just about everything. But you are not going to hear about “Asian” sex slavery gangs in Britain, or mass sexual assaults in Europe from your carefully controlled state broadcasters. No sirree! The carefully  controlled public and private broadcasters exercize restraint and discretion in how they treat outrages committed by Islamic street trash.

Breitbart London reports the a top German journalist has admitted that the state broadcasters take their orders from the “political class”.

A retired media boss at a major German state broadcaster has admitted his network and others take orders from the government on what — and what not — to report.

National public service broadcaster Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), which was recently forced into a humiliating apology for their silence on migrant violence and sex assault is being drawn into a fresh scandal after one of their former bureau chiefs admitted the company takes orders from the government on what it reports. He said journalists received instructions to write news that would be “to Ms. Merkel’s liking”.

Former head of ZDF Bonn Dr. Wolfgang Herles make the remarks during a radio event (from minute 27) in Berlin where journalists discussed the media landscape. Moving on to the freedom of the press, the panel chair asked Dr. Herles whether things in Germany had got “seriously out of whack”. With an honesty perhaps unusual in Germany, Dr. Herles replied that ordinary Germans were totally losing faith in the media, something he called a “scandal”. He said:

“We have the problem that – now I’m mainly talking about the public [state] media – we have a closeness to the government. Not only because commentary is mainly in line with the grand coalition (CSU, CDU, and SPD), with the spectrum of opinion, but also because we are completely taken in by the agenda laid down by the political class”.

“We are completely taken in by the agenda of the political class”.

There is nothing unusual or surprizing in this admission; German media are no more directed by government than are Canadian, and if they are, it is irrelevant to the argument I am making.

Broadcast media are the slaves of the agenda of the political class. Their enslavement is manifested by government regulation, by whose grace and favour they hold their licences, and to government funding, which keeps them alive. And no one  should imagine that private broadcasters are any the less enslaved to government licences because they are also enslaved to private sources of advertizing revenues.

[Take our own broadcasting system as a case in point. We have only to consider Lisa LaFlamme of CTV news hyping every story of political incorrectness and victim-mongering versus the relative calmer national broadcaster, to see the truth of that assertion].

Can you think of one issue of importance in contemporary life where the broadcast media have not toed the line laid out by the political class? Islam? Anthropogenic global warming? Mass uncontrolled immigration?(in the US), multiculturalism? Political correctness?

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Toeing the line: all feet come forward the same distance and height

And can you think of a single important political issue since 1990 where the contest against it did not start in the unregulated blogosphere? Certainly talk radio in the United States has assisted the expression of non-conforming thought. Yet the overwhelming case against the preferred positions of the political class have had their origin and found their audience through the blogosphere.

The most important function of the controlled media, here and elsewhere, is to persuade you that opposition is useless, vain, even insane, and that despite what is before your eyes, you must doubt what you experience and conform to the vision laid out by the media. You are alone; you are powerless to resist. No one thinks like you. You do not speak in public what you feel in private. I call it the Iron Mask of political correctness. It is placed over all of us, and it is our duty to notice it and take it off.

The liberation that came with the Internet – an unlicensed and democratic medium – was to allow people to identify themselves and not be alone, to make it easy for small groups to form who could share their disbelief in the false gods set before them by the national media to worship.

Some views expressed on the net are crazy, some bad, some vicious. Of this there is no doubt.  But the negatives are eclipsed by the enormous increase of freedom of opinion made possible by the freedom, efficiency, and ubiquity of the Internet. The means of expression has been liberated from government licensing, for the time being. Let’s keep it that way.

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Toeing the line: Government regulation of the broadcasting sector