Democrats Are Quite Comfortable Being Violent Extremists

Democrats Are Quite Comfortable Being Violent Extremists

BY STEPHEN KRUISER 

AP Photo/Matt Slocum

Top O’ the Briefing

Happy Wednesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Gareth’s Jello molds have lacked precision and pizazz ever since the disappearance of this pet opossum.

(Write me at morningbriefing@pjmedia.com for a chance to make it into Friday’s Mailbag of Magnificence.)

I don’t know about most of you, but I lead tame life for a guy who is supposed to be a violent extremist. Sure, I yelled a lot at the college football game last Saturday night but there has been a decided lack of setting things on fire, rioting, or plotting my next move as one of the greatest dangers to America.

The Democrats’ ongoing fairy tale about the nonexistent right-wing domestic threat is on my last nerve now, especially since we all know that the real dark evil in this country is lurking on the left. It’s not even on the fringes. A couple of weeks ago we saw the president of the United States deliver an unhinged screed and declare ideological war on half the voters in the country.

As we’ve mentioned here, many of the citizens of this great Republic aren’t wowed by Old Joe’s lack of control over his anger issues. Ryan wrote yesterday that the bad news about that for the Democrats just keeps rolling in:

The speech was divisive, disturbing, and downright scary, and Biden set out to paint “MAGA Republicans” as true enemies of the state. While it might have worked to some small degree among the radical factions of the left, a bombshell new poll has revealed that a majority of Americans — politics aside — believe that Biden’s nasty, evil speech was terrible form.

A new Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll published exclusively at The Hill revealed that a whopping 60% of Americans believe Biden’s speech “divided the country and set it back.” In comparison, only 40% believed his speech “united the nation and moved it forward.”

But wait, it gets worse — for Biden. Fifty-six percent of respondents said they opposed Biden’s speech, and 44% supported it. Those aren’t the numbers an underwater-polling president needs so close to a major election.

Democrats aren’t big on learning from their mistakes these days. Paula has this from the Senate race in Ohio:

But until this week, Ryan was running a disciplined campaign and had even distanced himself from Biden in order to gain the support of Republican and independent voters. Polling shows the race in a virtual tie, with Vance edging out Ryan in the RealClear Politics average by just 2.3 points, a month out from the start of early voting in the state. Ryan’s internal polling must be much worse, because on Tuesday, he turned a sharp corner and went full Joe Biden, lashing out at Trump supporters on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“We have to kill and confront [the MAGA] movement,” Ryan told host Willie Geist, adding that only “normal mainstream Republicans” are worth working with. He said this moments after (laughably) proclaiming that he’s “one of the most bipartisan members of Congress” and insisting, “I want to work across the aisle.”

Calling for the death of a movement that represents roughly half of America doesn’t seem like a good strategy if you’re touting your bipartisan bonafides, yet Ryan went there.

Yes, these are the same Democrats who love to blame “Republican rhetoric” for every crime under the sun. A picture of a target on a mailer from Sarah Palin was once blamed for a mass shooting.

Democrats have a lot of things to be angry about these days, to be sure. Biden’s mask is slipping more often, and they are having difficulty pretending that he’s functional. The strain of lying to themselves about this train wreck economy has to be taking its toll as well.

We know that they don’t have the guts to act up in red states and cities, but the commie places are probably ramping up for some election time powderkeg action. The Dems do love a good riot to deflect from their failures.

The domestic threat from violent extremists is very real. What’s really scary about that is that most of them are in the Biden administration.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2022/09/14/the-morning-briefing-democrats-are-quite-comfortable-being-violent-extremists-n1629363

BIDEN DEMANDS WHITE SUPREMACY

BIDEN DEMANDS WHITE SUPREMACY

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN FBI, JOE BIDEN, LIBERALS

FBI whistleblowers–in this case, the term is probably warranted–have come forward to say that the Bureau is pressuring them to come up with “white supremacists” to investigate, in order to advance the Biden administration’s agenda:

Current and former FBI agents have come forward saying the Biden administration is deliberately exaggerating the danger posed by white supremacists. They claimed that high-ranking FBI officials were pressuring field agents to fabricate domestic terrorism cases and label people as white supremacists in order to “meet internal metrics.”

To the best of my knowledge, I have never met a white supremacist, so this doesn’t surprise me. What ought to surprise all of us is that the FBI’s politicized hierarchy is so willing to do the corrupt bidding of the Democratic Party.

“The demand for white supremacy” coming from FBI brass “vastly outstrips the supply of white supremacy,” one agent told the Washington Times. “We have more people assigned to investigate white supremacists than we can actually find.”

The FBI agent, who requested anonymity in order to discuss internal bureau politics, said that top officials in the FBI “have already determined that white supremacy is a problem” and established a policy to prioritize investigations into racially-motivated domestic extremism.

“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” he said. “If they have a Gadsden flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.”

That is consistent with the disgraceful behavior we have seen from the FBI in recent years. The Bureau is one more once-great institution that has been destroyed by the Left.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/09/biden-demands-white-supremacy.php

TIME FOR EQUAL EXPECTATIONS

TIME FOR EQUAL EXPECTATIONS

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN DEMOCRATS, LIBERALS, RACE, SPORTS

Two stories in the news strike a common chord: the need to stop infantilizing minority, especially black, populations. The first comes from the world of sports and involves the familiar racial hate incident hoax. Briefly, the Duke women’s volleyball team played a match at Brigham Young University, and lost. After the match, the godmother of one of the Duke players, who is black, tweeted that someone in the BYU crowd had yelled the “N-word” at her goddaughter when she was serving. It turned out that she (the godmother) is a virulent anti-white racist (“These white folks ain’t never had they ass kicked, but they better get used to it”).

The player then backed up this claim, and it became a national news story. The reliably left-wing ESPN reported it as fact. The President of BYU denounced the incident. Good Morning America, ABC News, CNN and Deadspin all weighed in, as did Lebron James. A BYU student who was accused (wrongly, as it turned out) of being the perpetrator was suspended from attending the college’s sports events. And the coach of the South Carolina volleyball team canceled an upcoming match against BYU.

All of these people and institutions studiously ignored the fact that these campus “hate incidents” nearly always turn out to be hoaxes. One might have expected that Duke, given its history, would be sober enough to reserve judgment. But of course, that didn’t happen, even though the claim here was inherently dubious. Why didn’t the Duke player, or one of her teammates, or her coach, or anyone on the BYU team, or any other observers, say anything at the time?

Meanwhile, BYU carried out a meticulous investigation that involved interviewing dozens of witnesses, searching for someone–anyone!–who could corroborate the Duke claim. No one heard an “N-word” or any other racial slur during the match. Investigators reviewed video footage of the match. Nothing. They played audio recordings of the match, with the television feed deleted so that only crowd noise could be heard. Nothing. They solicited cell phone video from anyone in the audience that might have picked up a racial slur. Nothing. BYU finally concluded that there was no evidence that the alleged racist incident ever occurred, and apologized to the student who had been wrongly accused.

As far as I can tell, no one else apologized. Not Duke, and not the South Carolina coach, who stood by her decision to cancel her team’s match against BYU. And certainly not the Duke player or the godmother who made the false allegation. This is par for the course: a fabricated allegation of racist conduct is made, is greeted with ritual sympathy for the “victim” and condemnation of the unknown perpetrator, but soon is proved to be false. But with no consequences for those who perpetrated the hoax.

Amber Athey has more on the story here, and the New York Sun has more here. A couple of days ago, Steve linked to the report on BYU’s investigation.

On to case number two: the Mayor of New Orleans is a woman named LaToya Cantrell. Mayor Cantrell apparently has a taste for high living, and likes to fly first class. It came to light that she had run up $30,000 in first class air fares on the City’s tab, flying, in separate trips, to France and Switzerland. New Orleans’ rules say that employees are to fly on the cheapest fares available, but Cantrell is unrepentant.

In her own defense, she played the race card in perhaps the stupidest manner on record. She alleged that it is unsafe for a black woman to fly economy:

Cantrell has remained defiant in the face of a backlash, defending her luxury tickets by stating that she was “doing business” on behalf of the city and that it wouldn’t be safe for her to travel coach.

“My travel accommodations are a matter of safety, not of luxury,” Cantrell said at a press conference on Thursday, September 8, 2022. “As all women know, our health and safety are often disregarded and we are left to navigate alone. As the mother of a young child whom I live for, I am going to protect myself by any reasonable means in order to ensure I am there to see her grow into the strong woman I am raising her to be,” the mayor said. She added, “Anyone who wants to question how I protect myself just doesn’t understand the world black women walk in.”

The world that Ms. Cantrell walks in is the first class world, but one can only wonder on what basis the first class cabin is “safer” for black women–or anyone–than coach. If the plane crashes, passengers all go down together. Are there Ku Klux Klan members patrolling the economy section who don’t dare penetrate the curtain to first class? The idea is so dumb that no one could possibly believe it.

And, of course, whatever dangers might lurk in the rear of the aircraft are suffered by Mayor Cantrell’s staff: unlike the Mayor, they fly coach.

These instances are among many that reflect efforts by politicians, journalists and activists to infantilize large segments of our population, especially blacks. Will Mayor Cantrell be held to the same standard as any other arrogant, rule-breaking, self-interested politician? That depends on the voters, the overwhelming majority of whom are black. Is the absurd rationale that she asserts good enough for them? We will find out at the next election.

Will the days of false hate crime allegations ever come to an end? Will ESPN and the New York Times ever stop repeating every such allegation as gospel? Will university administrators ever get over the racial vapors? Will blacks who make false allegations ever be held responsible? And will someone finally ask, even if it were true that one fan at a volleyball match yelled the “N-word,” why is it national news?

It is time to move on, and begin to have equal expectations of all of our citizens.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/09/time-for-equal-expectations.php

QUOTE OF THE DAY

QUOTE OF THE DAY

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN JOE BIDEN

It’s early, I know, but I’m going with Lance Morrow’s Wall Street Journal column “Biden’s speech had it all backwards.” commenting on President Biden’s “Triumph of the shill” speech and other recent musings on “fascism”:

If there are fascists in America these days, they are apt to be found among the tribes of the left. They are Mr. Biden and his people (including the lion’s share of the media), whose opinions have, since Jan. 6, 2021, hardened into absolute faith that any party or political belief system except their own is illegitimate—impermissible, inhuman, monstrous and (a nice touch) a threat to democracy. The evolution of their overprivileged emotions—their sentimentality gone fanatic—has led them, in 2022, to embrace Mussolini’s formula: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Or against the party. (People forget, if they ever knew it, that both Hitler and Mussolini began as socialists). The state and the Democratic Party must speak and act as one, suppressing all dissent. America must conform to the orthodoxy—to the Chinese finger-traps of diversity-or-else and open borders—and rejoice in mandatory drag shows and all such theater of “gender.” Meantime, their man in the White House invokes emergency powers to forgive student debt and their thinkers wonder whether the Constitution and the separation of powers are all they’re cracked up to be.

There is much more that could be said, and we have tried to say some of it, but that is well said.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/09/quote-of-the-day-17.php

Hillary Clinton Lies About Her Mishandling of Classified Information

Hillary Clinton Lies About Her Mishandling of Classified Information

Katie Pavlich

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 @KatiePavlich

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Two time failed presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took to Twitter Tuesday to falsely claim she never mishandled classified information. 

But in July 2016, the FBI confirmed Clinton did in fact grossly mishandle a number of classified documents, which she stored on a private and unsecured email server in her bathroom. Despite this fact, prosecutors declined to bring charges against her. 

"Our investigation looked at whether there is evidence classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on that personal system, in violation of a federal statute making it a felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way, or a second statute making it a misdemeanor to knowingly remove classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities," Comey said. "From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification."

"Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent," Comey continued.  

Further, the comparison between President Donald Trump's handling of classified information to Hillary Clinton's negligence is a case of apples and oranges. Presidents have the ability to declassify material. Secretaries of State do not. 

Recommended

Dems: A Killer on Every Block and Two Rapists in Every Backyard

Ann Coulter

Former Supreme Court clerk Mike Davis recently explained: 

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2022/09/07/hillary-clinton-lies-about-her-mishandling-of-classified-information-n2612757

Critics of the pandemic school closures have been vindicated

Critics of the pandemic school closures have been vindicated

By 

Becket Adams, Contributor

Critics of the pandemic school closures have been vindicated.

They warned the closures would cause serious, possibly irreversible, developmental retardation. They warned of severe learning loss.

Alas.

The critics were not just ignored, they were also maligned by a vicious cabal of politicians, news media personalities, and education professionals, most notably American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. The critics were called monsters and "grandma killers." They were accused of not "trusting" the science.

"Children are resilient," the pro-closure camp smugly asserted. (No, it’s not that children are resilient. It’s that they don’t yet have the words to describe the ways in which you are harming them.)

Now, a little more than two years after the pandemic first came to America, new data confirm the mass school closures, which, by the way, Democratic politicians and teachers' unions enforced with a religious fever even long after the restrictions were shown to be little more than superstitious hocus-pokery, caused serious harm to young students.

"American students’ test scores plunge to levels unseen for decades," the Washington Post reported on Sept. 1. "Test scores in elementary school math and reading plummeted to levels unseen for decades," the report reads , citing the first "nationally representative report comparing student achievement from just before the pandemic to performance two years later."

It adds, "Math scores dropped seven points during that period, marking a first-ever decline, while reading scores slipped five points, producing the largest dip in 30 years on the National Assessment for Educational Progress, or NAEP, often called 'the nation’s report card.' The students who took the tests — given from January to March in 2020 and in 2022 — were 9 years old and mostly in fourth grade."

At the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the story is the same.

Who could’ve predicted this? Quite a few people, actually.

"There’s certainly no such thing as zero risk in anything we do, and that is certainly the case during a pandemic," Joseph Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings program at Harvard’s school of public health, said in a 2020 paper arguing in favor of school reopenings.

However, he added, "there are devastating costs of keeping kids out of school. When we have this discussion about sending kids back to school, we have to have it in the context of the massive individual and societal costs of keeping kids at home."

His and similar recommendations were rebuffed quickly by lockdown enthusiasts and teachers’ unions alike, both of whom characterized the effort to re-open schools as dangerous and even lethal.

Frustratingly enough, a not-insignificant number of parents also supported the closures, embracing the belief that in-person learning would jeopardize greatly the life and health of everyone involved. But ask yourself this: Where, exactly, do you suppose these parents got this idea? They got it from partisan state and local leaders, from grossly politicized public health agencies and teachers’ unions. They had fear pumped directly into their veins. They watched in 2020 as the Democratic National Committee ran ads claiming, among other things, that then-President Donald Trump was "risking teachers' and parents' lives" is his supposedly "desperate" push to reopen schools.

"[Trump is] ignoring how the virus spreads... going against the advice of experts," the ad said. "Do you trust him to do what’s best for our children?"

"One cannot overstate what a large role the political reaction against Trump, and his early failures on the pandemic, played in the extended closures in blue states and cities," ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis rightly observed last week. "Democrats saw a political opportunity in fanning the flames on school reopening, and it came at a cost."

Indeed.

Check this 2020 headline from the New York Times: "How Trump’s Push to Reopen Schools Backfired." The subhead reads , "Distrust of the president and his motives hardened the conviction of some educators that teaching in person was unsafe, helping drive union opposition."

On Thursday, after the learning loss data were released, AFT president Weingarten responded.

"Thankfully after two years of disruption from a pandemic that killed more than 1 [million] Americans, schools are already working on helping kids recover and thrive," she said. "This is a year to accelerate learning by rebuilding relationships, focusing on the basics."

The gall of this woman.

Weingarten acts as if the pandemic alone is responsible for the learning loss -- as if the restrictions she and her ideological allies promoted and enforced played no significant role. It's utterly shameless. Indeed, her comment is nearly as shameless as when National Public Radio declared this month, "Resistance to nuclear power is on the decline worldwide — and environmentalists helped lead the push. Here's why it's gaining support."

Yes, like Weingarten’s response this week, this actually happened. NPR actually said this.

And, yes, like Weingarten’s response, it’s a malicious, self-serving rewriting of history.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/community-family/critics-of-the-pandemic-school-closures-have-been-vindicated

Fact Checker Attempts to Debunk Link Between Defunding Police and Rising Crime, Fails Miserably

Fact Checker Attempts to Debunk Link Between Defunding Police and Rising Crime, Fails Miserably

• by: Matt Palumbo
 

Fight tech tyranny. Join Dan on Parler @dbongino.

Photos by Getty Images

In the latest edition of "fact checkers vs. reality," USA Today’s Daniel Funke turned criminologist and casted doubt on the obvious link between the "defund the police" movement and rising crime.

Funke's supposed "fact check" is specifically responding to a social media post that stated “twelve major cities broke homicide records this year. They are ALL led by Democrat Mayors. That is what happens when you defund the police.”

Funke acknowledges that “Between 2019 and 2020, the U.S. recorded its highest increase in the national homicide rate in modern history. And in 2021, 12 cities did break their annual homicide records,” while glossing over that it’s also true that those 12 cities have Democrat mayors. The only point that Funke refutes is that not all 12 cities defunded the police, which he then uses to justify titling his article “No evidence defunding police to blame for homicide increases.”

While the homicide rate rose nearly 30% in 2020, the largest year-over-year increase since at least 1905, the gain was even more pronounced in many of the major cities that defunded police, including Portland, which saw a 530% increase in their murder rate, Austin (74% increase), New York (56%), and Chicago’s (54%). While Funke's "fact check" is specific to police defunding, there are cities that didn't defund the police but had their police departments criplled by so-called "progressive prosecutors," which was another major factor in the national crime wave we're experiencing.  

Further destroying what was left of his credibility (which wasn't much, admittedly), Funke also calls into question whether police help that much at all in reducing crime.

He quotes one criminologist at the University of California-Irvine who told him that she’s not aware of any data that illustrates the effect of reducing the police on homicide rates, and that older research suggests there isn’t a definitive conclusion. Of course, that police reduce crime is just about the most replicated finding in the field of criminology.

To quote a brief summary of the existing literature:
 

• In a 2005 paper, Jonathan Glick and Alex Tabarrok found a clever instrument to measure the effects of officer increases through the terrorism “alert levels” that were a feature of the early to mid-aughts. During high-alert periods, the Washington, DC, police force would mobilize extra officers, especially in and around the capital’s core, centered on the National Mall. Using daily crime data, they found that the level of crime decreased significantly on high-alert days, and the decrease was especially concentrated on the National Mall.
• Stephen Mello of Princeton University assessed the Obama-era increase in federal police funding. Thanks to the stimulus bill, funding for Clinton’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) hiring grant program surged from about $20 million a year in the late-Bush era to $1 billion in 2009. The program design allowed Mello to assess some quasi-random variation in which cities got grants. The data shows that compared to cities that missed out, those that made the cut ended up with police staffing levels that were 3.2 percent higher and crime levels that were 3.5 percent lower. This is an important finding because not only does it show that more police officers leads to less crime, but that actual American cities are not currently policed at a level where there are diminishing returns.
• A larger historical survey by Aaron Chalfin and Justin McCrary looked at a large set of police and crime data for midsize to large cities from 1960 to 2010 and concluded that every $1 spent on extra policing generates about $1.63 in social benefits, primarily through fewer murders.

Contrary to the sort-of "police state" rhetoric the left will often deploy, even before the "defund the police" trend, the U.S. employed 35% fewer police per-capita than the world average. In 2018 the U.S. employed 238 cops per 100,000 people, while France employed 429 per 100k, Italy 456 per 100k, Russia 515 per 100k, and Germany 388 per 100k.

https://bongino.com/fact-checker-police-and-crime

Supporters of former President Donald Trump pray at the Save America Rally at the Adams County Fairgrounds in Mendon, Ill., on June 25, 2022. (Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images)

ECONOMY

On Health of the US Economy, Republicans and Democrats See Things Differently

By Naveen Athrappully

 

0:003:11

A majority of people who voted for former President Donald Trump admit that America is in a recession, while only a minority of Biden supporters agreed, according to a recent poll by The Economist and YouGov.

In response to a question about whether the United States is in a recession, 82 percent of respondents who voted for Trump in the 2020 election said that yes, the country is in a recession. Just 38 percent of respondents who voted for President Joe Biden agreed, while 40 percent said no and another 22 percent said they were not sure.

Broken down by party, 76 percent of Republicans agreed that the United States is in a recession, with 9 percent dismissing the idea and 15 percent being unsure. Among Democrats, 44 percent said yes, 35 percent said no, and 21 percent said they were unsure.

The poll was conducted among 1,500 adult U.S. citizens from Aug. 20 to Aug. 23 (pdf).

In terms of ideology, 79 percent of respondents who identified as conservatives said the United States is currently in an economic recession, along with 54 percent of moderates and 41 percent of liberals.

While 52 percent of Trump voters said they believed the prices of goods and services they buy is the best indicator of a recession, only 34 percent of Biden voters agreed.

Forty percent of Trump voters said they they think a recession in the next 12 months is “somewhat likely,” with Biden voters closely following at 39 percent.

However, 15 percent of Trump voters believe it is “very likely” that the United States will be in an economic recession in the next 12 months, triple the 5 percent of Biden voters who hold such a view. Another 31 percent of Biden voters said a recession in the next 12 months is “not very likely,” compared to just 13 percent of Trump voters.

Recession Predictions

The poll comes as several experts are raising alarm bells about the country entering a recession.

“We will have a recession because we’ve had five months of zero M2 growth, money supply growth, and the Fed isn’t even looking at it,” Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, told CNBC. “We’re going to have one whopper of a recession in 2023.”

M2—which includes cash, savings deposits, checking deposits, and money market securities—is seen as an indicator of future inflation and total money supply. Hanke pointed out that the money supply has stagnated in recent months, thus potentially leading to an economic slowdown.

In another interview with CNBC, Stephen Roach, a former Federal Reserve economist, predicted a recession as the “lagged impacts” of the Federal Reserve monetary tightening begins to kick in. “They haven’t kicked in at all right now,” he said while adding that the United States will need a “miracle” to avoid a recession.

The United States already posted its second consecutive quarter of negative economic growth in 2022, which is the generally accepted definition of a recession.

Gross domestic product fell by 1.6 percent in the first quarter and another 0.9 percent in the second quarter.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/on-health-of-the-us-economy-republicans-and-democrats-see-things-differently_4699128.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-08-31&utm_medium=email&est=C%2FRF0FB3OKtgvCLJJR5xRk%2Fb2FuXQtv93QPnk6OGfX8WuexH9iCMde10xUVe