Tuesday, June 30, 2020

WaPo Tried to Fact-Check Trump on Who Runs the Dangerous Cities... and Failed Miserably

WaPo Tried to Fact-Check Trump on Who Runs the Dangerous Cities... and Failed Miserably

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Earlier this week, Democrats blocked the Republican-written police reform bill, the JUSTICE Act. President Trump responded to this disgrace by pointing out the Democrats have a crappy record when it comes to crime. “You hear about certain places like Chicago and you hear about what’s going on in Detroit and other cities, all Democrat-run. Every one of them is Democrat-run,” Trump said. “The 20 worst, the 20 most dangerous are Democrat-run.”
Democrats now risk losing the high ground on police reform, and the media has chosen to step in and play defense for them. Which is exactly what Philip Bump of the Washington Post did. According to Bump, President Trump’s claim is dead wrong. “Trump keeps claiming that the most dangerous cities in America are all run by Democrats. They aren’t,” reads the headline of his fact check.
With a headline like this, certainly, Mr. Bump was going to provide us with statistics or a chart that showed that the most violent cities in America are somewhat more evenly controlled by Democrats and Republicans. If you thought that, you’d be wrong.
In fact, despite the fact check’s headline, here’s what Bump says:
The most recent data to that effect is from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report covering the first half of 2019. The cities with the most violent crimes are many of the most populous cities in the country, as you might expect. Those with the highest rates of violent crime are from a range of different states.
Most of the current mayors of these cities are Democrats. Two of the mayors of cities with the most reported violent crimes overall, though, are independents and one, the mayor of Jacksonville, Fla., is a Republican. Among the 20 cities with the most violent crime per capita, one isn’t a Democrat: the independent mayor of Springfield, Mo.
Bump showed this data graphically in the chart below:
This, according to Bump, totally debunks Trump’s claim, and claims Trump would “no doubt shrug at that detail, decrying as ‘fake news’ the revelation that his assertion was only slightly wrong.”
So, by this standard, because only 17 out of 20 of the most violent cities are run by Democrats, or 19 out of 20 of the most violent cities per capita are run by Democrats, Trump’s oft-repeated claim that the most dangerous cities in the country are run by Democrats is false.
And we’re supposed to believe that the Washington Post isn’t biased? How does someone like Philip Bump still have a job after basically trying to argue that two plus two equals five?
Bump then bloviates about why it doesn’t matter than an overwhelming majority of these violent cities are run by Democrats. “In fairness, it actually doesn’t matter that four of the 32 cities listed above have non-Democratic mayors — because it doesn’t really matter that the other mayors are Democrats.”
Of course, it doesn’t! He just spent several paragraphs claiming to disprove that very point, and yet, he now claims it doesn’t matter. Why? Because it’s only a coincidence that these urban areas are typically run by Democrats… and have been for years.
Is it really that hard for the media to admit when Trump is right? How many bogus fact checks does it take for a so-called journalist to be embarrassed?

CHRONICLES OF THE CRAZY TIME (11)

CHRONICLES OF THE CRAZY TIME (11)

 Okay, let’s start off with headlines that require no commentary:
Some call for replacement of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ with new national anthem
‘The Simpsons’ to Recast Characters of Color, ‘Family Guy’ Actor Stops Voicing Black Role
And, the winner:
 Well this is embarrassing: the majority of people attending protest rallies are white, according to a brand new Pew Research survey. Pew does backflips to try to obscure this fact, calling the demographic makeup of protesters “diverse.” But even Pew can’t avoid acknowledging the magnitude of the numbers:
Black Americans account for 17% of those who say they attended a protest focused on race or racial equality in the last month, compared with their 11% share of all adults in the survey.
In other words, more than 80 percent of protesters are white or another ethnicity.
There’s much more in the pile on my desktop, but I need a drink.

Don's Tuesday Column


          THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   6/30/2020
The left is saying overthrow America

160 years of insurgency, terrorism, treason and oppression of opponents has ensued from Democrat-led and -tolerated leftism/progressivism. “Resistance” is their word; it has analogies to Southern states’ “resistance” to the imposition of Federal authority post-Civil War, for the indisputably laudable goal of protecting the constitutional rights of newly-freed African-Americans. I’ve seen videos of white “Antifa/Black Live Matter” radicals screaming the n-word into the faces of black police officers. Disgusting.

For informed analysis, look up: “The Movement to Destroy a Nation,” by Shireen Qudosi, clarionproject.org; “The Left Pushes to Finally Take Down America,” by Michael Walsh, theepochtimes.com; “Raheem Kassam says the Democratic Party has declared war on America and its institutions.” Peruse those three articles before saying we are wrong about the left.

To be sure, some statues warrant removal, but the civilized, constitutional method is to sway public sentiment and achieve a consensus that prompts elected officials to take action. It’s decidedly not to gather a violent mob to deface and destroy public property, some of which is dedicated to the very cause—Lincoln freeing slaves, and African-American Union troops—they supposedly support. Look up “CNN’s Coates Excuses Anarchy: Statue Vandalism Is ‘Symbolic Speech’” by Alex Christy.

Indeed, one of the statues found intolerable by the violent, insurgent left is President Andrew Jackson, whose term sought to crush the Ku Klux Klan, the terrorist arm of the Southern Democrat party’s “resistance” to the imposition of (in their view Northern Republican) federal authority. During the Civil War we had “draft riots” in New York City where South-sympathizing, Democrat men engaged in insurrectionist violence against President Lincoln’s draft laws.

“Jim Crow” laws, poll taxes and the Klan’s terroristic intimidation of black citizens all had the goal of preventing them from exercising their rights under the Constitution. Not the least of those rights was the first true use of the 2nd Amendment’s primary purpose: The inviolable God (not government)-given natural right to self-defense, so that Southern black Republican citizens could ensure their very existence against “Jim Crow” Democrat despotism.

Current turmoil—the street violence of rioting-not-protesting activists against, ostensibly, racial injustice and police brutality—has now morphed into “burn down this system” (BLM leader). That’s resulted in around 700 damaged, burned and destroyed businesses in Minneapolis, MN and countless other destroyed, defaced and impacted businesses, churches and law enforcement assets. News media moved on from that issue—violence inuring to Trump’s benefit—to the previous campaign to sully Trump with rising Covid-19 infections. In spite of clearly protest-contact upward trends, mortality has declined from 2,500 to about 600 deaths per day.

The dead and injured officers—who comprise among the most heroic, self-sacrificing, principled protectors of America’s citizens—and innocent bystanders are a grim testament to the newly-unleashed anarcho-terrorists. They have historical precedents going back to the French Revolution’s “Reign of Terror,” the “brown shirt” street brigades’ violence against perceived enemies of Hitler’s Nazi regime, and the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” of youthful Maoist, Little Red Book-wielding dispensers of state violence.

That resembles the current case. The dovetailing of mass protest/riots with quasi-official elements of “resistance”—in local and state governments, the Democrat-appointed judiciary and their cheerleading justifiers in academia, entertainment and news media—constitutes a “full court press” of intimidation unseen since the 60s race riots and 200 bombings by SDS/Weather Underground radicals.

Who is targeted? Elected officials, who are browbeaten by calls to “defund/dismantle” the police. The relatively rare misuse of authority by law enforcement doesn’t warrant the wholesale undoing of the only entity, equipped and authorized to exercise force to protect our citizens, the poorest of which (mostly minorities) bear the heaviest burden of violent criminal behavior.

Also targeted: the vast middle class, of all races, that see riots, looting and arson in cities and blocks from their homes, employers and businesses—which represent decades and lifetimes of striving within the laws and norms to acquire for themselves and their families some abundance and comfort. It’s a thinly-veiled agenda of alienating voters away from the Republican, conservative, President Trump side—to the Democrats who offer seeming relief from the turmoil, as frustrated and scared citizens say “just make it stop”.

A recent Harvard Harris poll found that 60 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the police; 64 percent think that most police operate fairly and according to the rules. Blame for riots: 27 percent blame the police; 53 percent blame the protesters. Only 28 percent want the police defunded.

Let’s all agree with the Reverend Martin Luther King, 1960: “Black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy, and God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men. God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race and the creation of a society where all men will live together as brothers, and all men will respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality.”

Would that we could all agree on what racism is. Some see only systemic discrimination against minority groups, for which all whites bear a burden. Others limit racism to assuming negatively, prejudging and acting against an individual or group based solely on their race. The problem is that those adhering to the former view won’t accept, or “tolerate” if you will, that we who hold the latter view won’t personally accept the burden of guilt for the racism of others.

I don’t accept group guilt over individual accountability. Let every human heart grow in acceptance and love of others, no matter their superficial differences. Can I get an “Amen”?

'Tolerant' Liberals Target Black Republican Tim Scott with Threats and Racist Voicemails

'Tolerant' Liberals Target Black Republican Tim Scott with Threats and Racist Voicemails

We’ve all heard liberals claim time and time again that Republicans are racist and Democrats are the epitome of tolerance. Have you met liberals who suggested that it was self-evident that they were not racist simply because of their politics? I’ve met plenty.
If that were true, why is it that it seems like the only people who thought it was funny or cool to wear blackface in the past forty years were liberals?
But I digress. Despite Democrats’ self-righteous proclamations of unparalleled tolerance, they repeatedly fail to demonstrate their so-called tolerance the most, it seems, with black Republicans. Black Republicans are called traitors to their race, Uncle Toms, and worse. Senator Tim Scott, a black Republican, knows all too well about the intolerance and racism of the left.
RELATED: Senator Tim Scott Destroys Dick Durbin For Calling Scott’s Police Reform Bill a ‘Token’ Bill
CNN reports that Scott “has seen an uptick in racist and profanity-laced voicemails at his office since becoming the lead Republican on police reform legislation, including from one person who called him ‘Uncle Tim.'”
Scott, the only African American Republican in the chamber, played two of the messages for his GOP colleagues during a policy lunch Tuesday, according to his spokesman Sean Smith.
The caller who described Scott as “Uncle Tim” also said he was a “sellout” and “the lowest piece of sh*t this country ever produced.” That caller also made unflattering remarks about South Carolina’s other Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, and the two GOP senators from Florida, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott.
In a second message, the caller said, “all Republicans are nasty.”
“Most don’t mention any legislation, but it’s clear they’re related to police reform,” Smith noted. “The volume has increased greatly the past two weeks since it became known he was leading police reform efforts.”
Democrats used a procedural vote to block the JUSTICE Act on Wednesday.
“Tim Scott, my crosshairs on my rifle are going to be pointed right at your forehead and blow your black (inaudible) dumbass away,” one caller’s message said.
Senator Scott says the threats and racist remarks he gets from the left don’t bother him as much as what the Democrats did to thwart the JUSTICE Act.
“I think 2015 and the church shooting had more impact on me than the failure of this legislation. What is frustrating to me and what makes me emotional is not the toll that it has on me — I’m a pretty resilient guy, and I’m going to be great tomorrow and the next day and next day. It’s those people that we’re talking about that we almost make caricatures of them. That’s the toll. Toll’s not on me. Toll’s on communities that continue to see, like, they are walking in quicksand,” Scott said.

Monday, June 29, 2020

Joseph Stalin Explains Covid-19, BLM

Joseph Stalin Explains Covid-19, BLM

(AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)
“One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” This pithy aphorism—variants of which have been attributed to several historical figures, mostly Joseph Stalin—is key to understanding the hysteria that has dominated the first half of 2020 in the USA.
Its meaning seems simple enough: death only matters inasmuch as the ones dying are made to matter. Accordingly, if just one person dies—but you know (and presumably like) that person—such a death becomes “tragic.” Conversely, no matter how astronomical their number, the deaths of nameless and faceless people carry no “intimate”—that is to say, no emotional or sentimental—factor. They are just “statistics.” (This latter view is bolstered by the fact that death is inevitable and comes in a myriad of ways. So why obsess over or be shocked by it—especially when it comes to strangers?)
Communist dictator Joseph Stalin’s stated claim—that “one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”—is often referenced today to explain how he managed to kill millions of his own people. By seeing that his victims largely remained nameless and faceless, he ensured that their otherwise tragic deaths would appear as mere and inevitable statistics.
Ironically, while this would be an example of how a dictator can present his diabolical deeds as benign, since the start of 2020, the reverse tactic has been used in the US: a comparatively few deaths that, like the countless ones before them, might have remained statistical, have been presented as personal tragedies in order to scare, demoralize, and demonize America.
To understand this, one must first put aside their emotions and objectively consider some facts (i.e., easily “triggered” types need read no further).
Enter COVID-19: when kept in context, the number of lives lost to this virus is unremarkable and has not warranted the virtual shutdown of the U.S. and its economy. Why? Because coronavirus is only one of many causes of “preventable deaths” in the U.S. As discussed here, about a million Americans die every year from preventable causes—meaning causes that, often more than coronavirus, can easily be, but are not, prevented. Although these deaths are exponentially more than those from coronavirus, the media never says a word about them; they are mere and inevitable “statistics.”
Why this disparity? Why provide us with the names, faces, and stories of those who have died from coronavirus—but never talk about the millions who have died from other preventable causes of deaths, including from similar diseases (like regular flu, which annually claims as many as 80,000 American lives)? Why constantly show us a red bar on every news screen noting every single death caused by coronavirus—but never show us a similar graph of the many millions more who died from other preventable causes? Why not have a constant graph showing us how many Americans die annually—nearly three million in 2018, or 7,708 every day—and how they die?
In short, every death from coronavirus has been intentionally turned into a personal tragedy, while millions of deaths from similarly preventable and often more tragic causes in the U.S.—41,000 from second-hand smoke, 40,000 from car accidents—have remained a statistic; things we just learn to live with.
Then there was the George Floyd incident: while arresting a black man, a white police officer killed him. America has since been on fire; listening to the media, one would think that racism is so embedded in America that all across its streets police are randomly arresting, torturing, and murdering black men. Accordingly, widespread violence, looting, burning, the destruction and decapitation of America’s heritage—even the “annexation” of territory in Seattle—are the inevitable backlash that must be patiently endured.
And yet, the irony remains: if black lives matter—and they certainly do—shouldn’t we start by saving the exponentially more black lives lost at the hands of other blacks? Every year, several thousand blacks are murdered by other blacks in the streets of America; between just 1979 and 2014, 324,000 blacks were killed by other blacks. Indeed, just this last weekend, 85 were shot, and 24 died—including a 3-year-old and a 13-year-old girl—in Chicago alone.
And yet, this is a nontalking point for the media; these thousands of needlessly and tragically lost black lives are a statistic.
It comes to this: death is inevitable; everyone will experience it, one way or another. As such, whenever the media make a big deal about any one—or one kind of—death, know that they are doing so only because it serves an agenda: in this case, to sow fear, hatred, and division.
Joseph Stalin knew how this works; so do his neo-Marxist successors in America.

The treasonous head of John Kerry rears again

The treasonous head of John Kerry rears again

John Kerry, a failed senator, a failed presidential candidate, and a failed secretary of state, is back again, campaigning in Florida for Joe Biden.
True to character, he's put his treason-face on.  According to the Washington Examiner:
Former Secretary of State John Kerry raised the possibility that a victory by President Trump could provoke a revolution in the United States, claiming that Republicans have a history of denying voting rights to Democratic voters.
"If people don't have adequate access to the ballot, I mean that's the stuff on which revolutions are built," Kerry said during a virtual appearance at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit. "If you begin to deny people the capacity of your democracy to work, even the Founding Fathers wrote in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, we have an inherent right to challenge that. And I'm worried that increasingly, people are disaffected."
This is utterly untrue.  It comes off as foreign propaganda, of the type Russia puts out, intended to sow falling confidence in the integrity of elections.  If a Democrat loses, he's saying, it has to be because Republicans suppressed the vote. 
It's also false on multiple fronts.  Republicans are not the ones who opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as several major civil rights bills that came of that era — the opponents were Democrats, same party that did everything they could to thwart President Lincoln before and during the Civil War.  Republicans voted in higher percentages than Democrats to support the big civil rights bills of the 1960s and that's an easy fact-check that Kerry is old enough to remember.
As for claims that voting is being suppressed now, more slander from a provable liar.  His beef is over simple matters of voter ID, which goes miles to prevent Democrat operatives from stuffing the ballot boxes to steal elections.
That he implies his own election was somehow stolen, and that of Georgia failed candidate Stacey Abrams, is utterly false — and has been proven in recounts and other measures again and again, despite Abrams's and his own bitternesses at losing in close races.
This has the earmarks of sowing discord and discontent — a bid to demoralize Latino voters — which was at least one of the audiences he was targeting in Florida — so they imagine there's no alternative but revolt.  It sounds as though he's actually trying to whip up a revolution rather than warn of one, given the bedrock of lies he builds it on.
That has more than whiff of treason.
And sure enough, treason is something he's been bedmates with all his life.
He threw his military medals over a fence to protest the Vietnam War — by showing contempt for the U.S. military uniform.
He got caught collaborating with the mullahs of Iran over how to undermine President Trump's bid to end the Iran deal, a bad treaty voters voted Trump in to get rid of.  Kerry advised the mullahs to hold on, thwart Trump, and just wait till they got into power again.
Now he's plying Russian propaganda techniques to bring turmoil and uncertainty.
This clearly is a guy who hates the country of his citizenship.  At what point is it going to catch up to him?  It needs to catch up soon.

POLL: AMERICANS ARE CONCERNED THAT CRITICISM OF POLICE WILL REDUCE SAFETY

POLL: AMERICANS ARE CONCERNED THAT CRITICISM OF POLICE WILL REDUCE SAFETY

If you follow the news as presented by the mainstream media, you might well infer that America has lost its mind, at least insofar as policing is concerned. As depicted by the media, the current debate is between those who want to abolish the police and those who merely want to hamstring it.
However, a new Rasmusssen poll indicates that, combined, these two positions — abolish and hamstring — have little public support. Americans are worried about too little policing, not too much. We haven’t lost our minds.
Rasmussen says:
Most Americans value the role of the police and worry that increasing criticism of cops will make their communities less safe. Black Americans are the most concerned.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 63% of American Adults still regard being a police officer as one of the most important jobs in our country today, down only slightly from 68% three years ago. Twenty-six percent (26%) disagree, up from 19% in the earlier survey. Eleven percent (11%) are not sure.
Sixty-four percent (64%) are concerned that the growing criticism of America’s police will lead to a shortage of police officers and reduce public safety in the community where they live. That includes 39% who are Very Concerned. But 33% don’t share that concern, with 14% who are Not At All Concerned about the risk to public safety.
Blacks (67%) are the most concerned about public safety where they live, compared to 63% of whites and 65% of other minority Americans.
(Emphasis added)
The public also agrees with President Trump’s pro-police sentiments:
Fifty-six percent (56%) of Likely U.S. Voters agree with President Trump when he said recently: “Our police have been letting us live in peace, and we want to make sure we don’t have any bad actors in there. [But] 99% of them are great, great people.” Thirty percent (30%) don’t agree, while 14% are not sure.
What about cutting police budgets? According to Rasmussen, “59% are opposed to cutting their local police budget, while 14% are undecided.”
Do Americans consider cops to be racist? No.
Sixteen percent (16%) of Americans think most cops are racist in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, up from 10% a year ago. But 67% still rate the performance of their local police as good or excellent.
Interestingly, Americans see less racism among cops than they do among their fellow countrymen in general. Twenty-two percent (22%) believe most Americans are racist.
So, American hasn’t lost its mind. And unless Joe Biden gets wholeheartedly behind the police — something I doubt he’s capable of doing at this point — President Trump holds a winning hand on a very important issue.

Sunday, June 28, 2020

Stand Up, Republicans


Thomas D. Klingenstein and Ryan P. Williams
According to recent polls, 65% of all Americans now support Black Lives Matter (BLM). Why do so many Americans support an “organization” that is avowedly dedicated to the proposition that America is evil and must be fundamentally transformed? Because the Republican establishment has made remarkably little effort to expose BLM as the revolutionary and totalitarian movement that it is.

Leading Republicans do not seem to understand that George Floyd’s death was the excuse for the current crisis, not the cause of it. The chaos in our streets—led by BLM, supported by Democrats, and propelled by higher education—is for all intents and purposes an effort to destroy the American way of life. Almost all Republicans, however, are stupefied, spectators to this tragedy.

“We’re trained Marxists,” Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors has proudly admitted. On CNN just the other day, Cullors said emphatically, “Our goal is to get Trump out”—not in November, but “immediately.” BLM is on record in 2016 marching to the tune of “Pigs in a blanket. Fry ’Em Like Bacon! KILL THE COPS.” Today, BLM is the drum major in the Democrats’ band. BLM calls for the destruction of our history and the traditional family, the dismantling of “cisgender privilege,” open borders, reparations, socialism, and of course, abolishing the police. When Biden and “mainstream” Democrats get off their knees, they will not be able to resist falling into step.

Unlike Democrats, Republicans do not kneel before their captors, but they are certainly not standing up to them. Republicans denounce BLM’s extremes (the violence and police defunding), but they leave unchallenged its central goal: the destruction of the American way of life. As the poll numbers attest, BLM is succeeding and stands virtually unopposed. If it succeeds, it will be fatal to America.

In this time of national insanity, what is needed is clarity and firmness. Republicans must stop saying America is racist. It’s not true, and it does terrible damage to give any credibility to BLM. Republicans should tell the truth, without any attempt to appease the woke: BLM is racist, not America. In America, all lives matter. Cops are no more likely to kill black suspects than they are to kill white suspects. The existence of the black underclass has virtually nothing to do with racism, and a great deal to do with liberal wokeness, which, with its ethos of guilt and victimhood, does not seem to give a damn about black lives.

Republicans should be spending their time making it clear that the Democrats are the party of BLM, that the choice is between BLM and America, and that America is the best and only hope for us all. Republicans should not be negotiating anything until peace is restored. Then, instead of negotiating over the names of military bases or police training, Republicans should be negotiating over the most effective ways of exposing corporate subsidies of BLM and protecting the American people from the Big Tech thought police, currently aiding and abetting the destruction of Western civilization.

If our leaders on the Right stand unflinchingly for the America of 1776—the America of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.—a majority of her citizens, whatever the color of their skin or party affiliation, will stand with them.

Thomas D. Klingenstein
Chairman

Ryan P. Williams
President

The Claremont Institute

The Left Pushes to Finally Take Down America (DP: A must-read to the end, even given the length)

The Left Pushes to Finally Take Down America

Commentary
Decades in preparation, the future United States of America that the international left intends to fashion is near at hand.
Since the arrival of the Frankfurt School of Marxist philosophers, cranks, crackpots, and creeps on our shores in the 1930s, the Enlightenment foundations of our nation have been under constant attack.
Wielding their pseudo-intellectual doctrine of Critical Theory as a battering ram, men like Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Wilhelm Reich saw it as their duty to undermine every legal and social American institution, from the family, to traditional sexuality, to academe, pop culture, government, and even the military. Nothing was safe from their iniquitous inquisition.
At first, they seemed vaguely ridiculous, a bunch of nutty professors with Dr. Strangelove accents. But don’t be fooled.
Reich, a Freudian psychiatrist who often treated his patients in the nude, invented the “sexual revolution,” later popularized by Hugh Hefner in the pages of Playboy. His quack theories about sexuality were called “a fraud of the first magnitude” by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and he died, intermittently psychotic, in federal prison in 1957.
Adorno, who had been a “modern music” composer and critic back in Germany, moved to Los Angeles and hated everything about it, including the weather.
Worst of all was Marcuse—whose pomposity was gleefully skewered by Joel and Ethan Coen in their 2016 comedy, “Hail, Caesar!”—a social destabilizer who first penetrated the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, forerunner of the CIA), then corrupted generations of American college students at Columbia University (where the expat Frankfurters first found refuge), Harvard, Brandeis, and finally the University of California at San Diego.
It was Marcuse who invented the theory of “repressive tolerance,” which might best be described as tolerance for me, but not for thee: “The realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.”
What he didn’t mention was that tolerance toward such inimical aberrations as Marxism would only last until it triumphed, after which “tolerance” would be abolished.
(For more on Critical Theory, and the Frankfurt School and their wholly deleterious effects on American and Western civilization, please see my 2015 book, “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace,” and its 2018 sequel, “The Fiery Angel.”)
And so we’re experiencing now the full fruition of the Frankfurt School’s cultural revolution and what the German communist Rudi Dutschke, referencing Mao, famously called “the long march through the institutions.”
What the Soviet Union failed to do economically and militarily during its losing 20th-century confrontation with the West, cultural Marxism has come close to realizing: the collapse of Western Civilization via the destruction of what the Russian communists used to refer to as the “principal enemy”—the United States.

Setting Kindling Ablaze

Having drilled several generations of students in Marxist cant—whenever you hear words like “systemic,” “struggle,” “structural,” “change,” “fundamental transformation,” et al., you know you’re dealing with Marxists—the tinder was laid, and all the new left needed was a match.
The election of Donald Trump four years ago at first shocked and then galvanized them, birthing the “resistance” and unleashing the “Russian collusion” hoax, the Ukrainian impeachment charade (Lt. Col. Vindman, anybody?) and, with the death of an ex-con named George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody in late May, an unchained Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, along with its largely white auxiliaries (and Marcuse’s bastard children), Antifa.
Presto; the national media now marches in Stalinist lockstep with the shibboleths of BLM, beginning with the demonstrably false accusation that cops are targeting young black males for extinction.
In a trice, riots have broken out, monuments to American heroes, including some of the Founding Fathers, have been pulled down a la Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War, and whole areas of American cities are suddenly occupied by violent anarchists. How quickly the illegal COVID-19 lockdowns were forgotten in the name of “social justice”—and yet how long their unconstitutional effects have lingered.
It is as if somebody had given the signal, and suddenly, in “blue” cities across the land, not only BLM and the Antifa punks have risen to show their true colors, but the politicians who run those cities as well.
The white mayor of Seattle, Jenny Durkan, has been content to watch her city burn, its downtown illegally designated as the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” or, latterly, the “Capitol Hill Organized Protest”—although she now says it will be taken back by the authorities.
Meanwhile, the black mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, seems indifferent to the weekly death toll of young black Americans, murdered by other young black Americans. On June 22 alone, 41 Chicagoans were shot, six of them fatally. Apparently their lives don’t matter, as they serve no political purpose.

‘White Supremacy’

Make no mistake: This assault has been planned and coordinated for years to strike America where she is weakest: in her innate sense of rightness and fair play. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement was heavily penetrated by the Soviets, who cynically felt they could manipulate American emotions while appealing to the better angels of our nature. But how quickly we have moved from King’s plea that we judge a man by “the content of his character” and back to “the color of his skin.”
Marxists see the world in categorical terms: You are not an individual (individuals are too difficult to control), but a member of a group (mobs are easy), subgroup, or even many subgroups (hence the proliferation of sexual categories from the genuine 2 to 46, by one recent count). Meanwhile, the enemy remains the same: the white, probably Christian, male.
Accordingly—and with astonishing rapidity—Western civilization from Aquinas to Mozart to Ronald Reagan now effectively equals “white supremacy,” and therefore must be destroyed.
Monuments to Washington, Jefferson, Francis Scott Key, and even Teddy Roosevelt have fallen or been marked for removal. Never mind that Roosevelt was the first president to host a black man, the great Booker T. Washington, at a dinner party in the White House (an event memorialized in Scott Joplin’s now-lost ragtime opera, “A Guest of Honor.” Joplin, who was black, also saluted Roosevelt in his rag, “The Strenuous Life,” after Roosevelt’s 1899 speech of the same name). He must go.
Which is also why statues of both Robert E. Lee, who led the principal Confederate force, the army of Northern Virginia, and the man Abraham Lincoln selected to crush him, the Ohio-born heartlander Ulysses S. Grant, are both being pulled down. It doesn’t matter that they were antitheses in life. What matters is that they are both significant figures from the past of a country that in the left’s eyes has no future, because it doesn’t deserve one.

‘Critical Theory’

Don’t look for logic in the Marxists’ selection of targets. “Critical Theory” seeks to undermine our self-knowledge and cultural self-confidence by insisting that everything is a “construct,” a plot by the “privileged” against the “oppressed.”
It holds that there is no received tenet of civilization that shouldn’t be questioned (the slogan “question authority” originated with the Frankfurt School), attacked, and destroyed. Our cultural totems, values, and taboos are declared either arbitrary, or the result of a long-ago “conspiracy,” steadfastly maintained down through the ages.
But where is the pushback? Republicans, the heirs to Lincoln and Grant, have fled the field. Led by the feckless former House speaker and failed vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, the Republicans ceded the lower chamber to the Democrats in 2018.
Partly as a result, President Donald Trump is in the fight of his life. Should he lose to the semi-animated hologram of a gibbering Joe Biden, and the Democrats recapture the Senate (very possible), who will be left to defend the nation?
Something to think about as we head into campaign season.