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Trump vs. the Enemies of the People

August 27, 2017

Trump vs. the Enemies of the People, PJ Media, Andrew Klavan, August 27, 2017

Don Lemon

Trump is also correct when he says that the masked and violent fascists who call themselves anti fascists are just as blameworthy as the Nazis-types. Even if you shout “equality” while you’re hitting people over the head, guess what? You’re still scum. There is no moral difference between balaclavas and white sheets, no matter what you pretend to espouse.

So after the media’s disgusting display of bias and dishonesty, the sight of CNN’s Don Lemon reacting to Trump’s brutal slap-fest with his face all scrunched up like a crying baby’s was a thing of absolute beauty. Lemon and his whole panel threw a tantrum: “He’s unhinged…. His speech was without thought. It was without reason. It was devoid of facts. It was devoid of wisdom. There was no…” But I couldn’t hear the rest because I was laughing too hard.

The white nationalists and the Anti-fas creeps are the worst people in the country. But the truth is, Don Lemon and his ilk do a lot more damage. It’s they — the moral gnomes of the Democrat-Media complex — who divide us, who gin up hysteria whenever they, the Democrats, don’t get their way. It’s they who tell us we’re an institutionally racist nation when we no longer are, who tell us that there’s only one legitimate view on each issue — theirs — and that anything else is pure hatred.

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It’s true that Donald Trump cannot yet claim a major legislative accomplishment. It’s also true that he himself bears some of the blame for that: the distractions of his chaotic style have given cover to a divided and spineless GOP legislature. Nonetheless, those of us who voted for him with misgiving can still feel more than well pleased with his three major achievements so far: the appointment of an excellent Supreme Court justice; the battle against the Giant Squid-like beast of the regulatory state; and the fact that he’s not Hillary Clinton, a felonious battle-axe who would’ve continued the Chicago-style corruption of the Obama administration and destroyed the American Experiment with freedom-smothering socialism. Speaking personally, I’d put Trump on Mount Rushmore for that last achievement alone.

But there’s a fourth major accomplishment too, unofficial and extra-governmental though it may be: Trump’s emotional torture of the press.

This is no small thing. It’s hero work, for my money. Trump hasn’t assaulted the First Amendment — as Obama did with his corruption of the IRS and Hillary would have with her pledge to overturn the Citizens United decision. But he has given sweet, well-deserved and genuinely holy hell to that corrupt arm of the Democratic Party that is generally called the Mainstream Media: the New York Times and the Washington Post and the like, the network news, and of course tiny little unwatched and unwatchable CNN.

That speech Trump gave on Tuesday in Phoenix calling out the media for their lies and bias — it was wonderful. It was so great I had to check with friends to make sure I was seeing the beautiful thing I saw. After a week and a half of dishonest and overblown media coverage of Trump’s remarks about the violence in Charlottesville, he crushed those lying skunks like Godzilla crushed Tokyo. I laughed and laughed with pure delight.

Now, I didn’t like the way Trump handled the Charlottesville affair much myself. As long as white supremacist slimebags call themselves the “right” and express support for him, the president should make double efforts to slap them silly and reassure our black citizens that they’re included in his vision of restored American greatness. But he never defended these racist creeps — as the Times and CNN and other outlets claimed he did. And he never said there were “very fine people” among the Nazis. He’s not the most articulate bloke, but I think it was clear he meant there are fine people who oppose the taking down of statues. He’s right, of course: I oppose it, and I’m an absolutely wonderful guy. Trump is also correct when he says that the masked and violent fascists who call themselves anti fascists are just as blameworthy as the Nazis-types. Even if you shout “equality” while you’re hitting people over the head, guess what? You’re still scum. There is no moral difference between balaclavas and white sheets, no matter what you pretend to espouse.

So after the media’s disgusting display of bias and dishonesty, the sight of CNN’s Don Lemon reacting to Trump’s brutal slap-fest with his face all scrunched up like a crying baby’s was a thing of absolute beauty. Lemon and his whole panel threw a tantrum: “He’s unhinged…. His speech was without thought. It was without reason. It was devoid of facts. It was devoid of wisdom. There was no…” But I couldn’t hear the rest because I was laughing too hard.

On top of this, the leftist mob outside the speech showed the country their true colors by rioting! CNN and CBS and the Times and every other Democrat outlet I saw tried to blame even that on Trump! But the country saw what it saw and all the lies in the world won’t wash the images away. The left is violent, and the mainstream left covers for them.

The white nationalists and the Anti-fas creeps are the worst people in the country. But the truth is, Don Lemon and his ilk do a lot more damage. It’s they — the moral gnomes of the Democrat-Media complex — who divide us, who gin up hysteria whenever they, the Democrats, don’t get their way. It’s they who tell us we’re an institutionally racist nation when we no longer are, who tell us that there’s only one legitimate view on each issue — theirs — and that anything else is pure hatred.

I don’t know how much Donald Trump can get done over the next seven years — which is how long he’ll be president if the media keeps their coverage at this level — but if he does nothing else than cause the Lemon Gang some of the emotional pain they so richly deserve, I’ll count it a presidency worth having. Trump’s right on  this: they’re enemies of the people.

Categories: "Alt right", "Anti-Fascists", Media and Trump, Trump and media
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America’s Post-Charlottesville Nervous Breakdown Was Deliberately Induced

August 25, 2017

America’s Post-Charlottesville Nervous Breakdown Was Deliberately Induced, The Federalist, , August 25, 2017.

NBC News / YouTube

Wars are won or lost based mostly on perceptions of events, not on what actually happens. This is true for any given battlefield, whether it’s the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam or the ideological battlefield over the future of the First Amendment as played out in Charlottesville in 2017. The reality of what takes place in the public arena is always secondary to any projected illusion.

So let’s never forget this: Whoever has the power to dictate public perceptions of reality is in a position to dictate public opinion and behavior. Abusing language and images to stir up emotions is an ancient trick of power-mongers. And once journalism turns into unchecked propaganda, we become trapped in its dangerous illusions.

Only the teensiest fraction of Americans have any real interest in violent extremism, whether it be the violence represented by the specter of the Klu Klux Klan or the violence promoted by groups like Antifa who pretend they are fighting for social justice. But the media is promoting imagery of the former as a foil for the latter.

Why Are We Being Assaulted With Fringe Concerns?

Most Americans today are still just trying to live freely, to pursue happiness peacefully. Meanwhile, power elites in politics and the media are providing a daily platform for fringe elements who identify as white supremacists. Why would anyone in his right mind do such a thing? Again, we can only deduce that such imagery serves as a useful foil to lend moral high ground to “counter-protesters.” The media elites provoking them need white supremacy bogeymen in order to achieve their ultimate agenda, which, ironically, is to achieve total supremacy.

Against this staged backdrop, repeated over and over again, Americans are being emotionally manipulated to take up cause with those whose ultimate purpose is the repeal of the First Amendment and erasure of national memory. As Helen Raleigh recently wrote in The Federalist, this has all the hallmarks of an attempted Maoist-style cultural revolution.

We should be asking why these elites insist that violence-prone groups on the American Left—such as Antifa, Occupy, Moveon.org, etc.—are pure as the driven snow, as peaceful as sleeping babes. Obviously it disrupts the narrative to know that the Southern Poverty Law Center inspired gunmen into attempted massacres, including the one in June that critically wounded GOP Rep. Steve Scalise and the 2012 shooting at the Family Research Council. So maintaining the illusion of such groups’ innocence is what allowed Michael Moore to argue in a recent CNN interview that he was promoting a society of “love” while smearing as racist every one of the 60 million Americans who voted for Trump. That’s a rallying cry for national division.

The polarization of America didn’t happen overnight. It’s actually not even all that real. It’s been teased out over many decades by media, entertainment, and academia in order to reap the agitation we’re seeing today. Understanding the how and why of this process is critical to reviving civil society and our freedoms. So, how did this all come to be? There are myriad factors: family breakdown, mob psychology, fear of being politically incorrect, the cultivation of ignorance in public education, the inflammation of resentments and hatred and false guilt, people should really start thinking on getting help from awol academy to educate themselves.

A lot more factors are responsible for the state of mass delusion we appear to be in today, but I’ll try to map out three elements I think the recent gruesome events in Charlottesville highlight: 1. the manipulation of our language; 2. the deliberate use of such loaded language to cultivate extreme emotions in people, particularly anger and resentment; and 3. the role of mass media as a nuclear device to impose those perceptions on a mass scale

Element 1: Loading the Language

Mavens of social media have inundated us with trendy terms intended to mold our thought patterns. Let’s just consider two expressions: “alt-right” and “woke.” First, “alt-right.” It’s a tar-and-feather term intended to eliminate independent thought by getting the masses to associate the “right” with various boogeymen like the KKK of old. The goal is to eliminate their “hate speech.” Once the alt-right domino falls, then conservatives’ speech goes. Then the speech of everybody else, because the First Amendment must stand for everyone or it stands for absolutely no one.

Then there’s the expression “woke.” It’s even more direct in its purpose: literally to activate people into a program of collective thought reform. “Woke” is a semantic device that promotes social distrust and even paranoia. The idea is that evil conspiracies—white supremacism, slavery, Confederate flags—are behind every bush targeting you. It comes with corollary slogans, such as #staywoke and #stayangry.

Such terms are the pieces of anti-intellectual spaghetti that stick to the walls of our minds when we are not equipped to think independent thoughts. The thought police aim to make certain words and thoughts catch on in the hive mind, thereby cultivating certain emotions and behaviors in people.

But when honestly defined, the term “woke” actually means “programmed.” You can see it in today’s manufactured mobs composed of individuals who identify as social justice warriors. Any different opinion is likely to trigger a panic attack in them. They are blindly obedient to college professors who get them to confess their guilt for being born into “white privilege”—or being born at all. They parrot taunts to their perceived enemies and take safety in mobs that threaten violence, knowing full well when the local political machine has kneecapped police, whether it be in Berkeley or Charlottesville.

The coordinated mob violence we see playing out essentially over the existence of historical monuments and free speech goes well beyond indoctrination and brainwashing. It is a cult mindset deliberately cultivated by elites in education, pop culture, and academia.

When Anti-Fascism Means Fascism

So in a very real sense, as George Orwell wrote in “1984,” words take on their opposite meanings. For example, freedom means slavery and vice versa. Ignorance means strength. Today it’s clear that the hyped term “anti-fascism” as in Antifa actually means fascism.

Is there anything President Trump could have said or done that would have made a difference under today’s social and media conditions? Perhaps for a few thoughtful people, his choice of words would have made a difference. But for the most part, even if he had from the outset spoken in a presidential manner and with all of the Left’s approved words, nothing would have changed in the propaganda media. Even if Trump had mimicked the SPLC and said the Charlottesville rioting was only about white supremacy and the KKK and that, yes, all historical monuments that Alinskyites want down should come down, it would not have changed the anti-speech trajectory of the anti-speech mob.

We are in full mass delusion mode. Our language has been undermined to game our perceptions. Those altered perceptions pull us into the groupthink that feeds fake public opinion cascades. Large segments of society, including many who should know better, have fallen for it, speaking apologetically and bolstering what is clearly a ruse to repeal the First Amendment. They fear someone might think them a bigot if they criticize the violence perpetrated by anti-speech activists like Antifa and Occupy. So they feed the violence by giving it a pass.

Element 2: Using Distorted Language to Rub Resentments Raw

The growth of this cult-like mentality is reflected in Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” He states that the whole point of manipulating language is to obfuscate in order to control. Anger and resentment are strong, natural motivators for getting people to attack perceived enemies. Bitterness is at the heart of every grudge, and those drunk on power have always depended on such misery to play their divide-and-conquer games.

Once bitterness sets in, it rots out the human capacity for social harmony and acts of mercy. At best, it’s passive-aggressive. At worst, it’s the short fuse to violence. At the core of it all is identity politics enforced by political correctness, special tools of propagandists to divide us in order to conquer us.

When people nurse grudges, they tend to grow into obsessions. Obsessions easily become delusions as we perseverate upon them, creating ever more monsters in our minds. Pretty soon a bunch of kids are pulling down a statue in Durham, North Carolina to engage in what psychiatrist Joost Meerloo described as “ecstatic participation in mass elation.” In his book “The Rape of the Mind,” Meerloo called this type of mob action “the oldest psycho-drama in the world.”

When minds become captive to the propagandist’s boogeymen, our survival mechanisms go into effect and we feel we must slay monsters, whether real or imaginary. This is especially true when a mob of supposedly like-minded folks come together to face off against their common enemy. Like in Charlottesville or any other place where a governor might abuse his power to promote riots by making sure there is no law enforcement present to maintain order. That was always the real point of promoting the riots in Charlottesville and so many other places by getting the police to stand down. The purpose of the media collusion is to get their movie running 24/7 in as many heads as possible.

We’ve not been vigilant as we’ve been taken down a long road of what influence guru Robert Cialdini calls “pre-suasion,” or laying the groundwork to influence others’ decisions, then taking advantage of the “privileged moments” that ensue. The privileged moment of the Left today consists of a pompous moral elevation to get people to focus on a well-cultivated fear of being tainted by association with racist nutcases. Unless we quickly become more vigilant to this ruse, it’ll be too late when we realize we’ve been manipulated by Stalinists all along.

Alinskyite Cultivation of Hatred

None of this is new. The archetypal agitation expert Saul Alinsky considered resentment an absolutely essential tool for replacing freedom with totalitarianism. All in the name of freedom, of course. If you study history, you’ll note how all tyrants project their own intentions onto their perceived opponents. It’s a well-documented pattern in all genocides. Fascism can only come to power in America, for example, through an echo chamber repetitiously promoted as “anti-fascism.”

Consider these choice quotes from Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals,” which serves as a guidebook on the art of cultivating hatred in people: “The organizer must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression . . . an organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent; provide a channel into which people can angrily pour their frustrations . . . your function – to agitate to the point of conflict.”

Here’s another choice quote from that piece of work: “The one thing that all oppressed people want to do to their oppressors is sh-t on them.” The trick is to get people to conjure up the illusion of white hoods behind every bush, and redefine the word “hate” so it applies to anybody who thinks a thought independent of elitist groups like the SPLC.

Alinsky knew that a few power-hungry elites like himself couldn’t simply undermine a free nation on their own. He needed drones to do his bidding—mob mobilization papered over with the euphemism “community organizing.” This is why totalitarians—from Marx to Lenin to Stalin to Mao to Castro and so on—always depend upon agitating and mobilizing masses via the abuse of mass media. Real debate is anathema to that goal, which is why free speech is always such an enemy of tyrants. Free speech is an essential antidote to any form of slavery.

Element 3: Mass Manipulation Via Mass-Media Propaganda

Our brains work primarily by making associations towards whatever is capturing our attention at any given moment. Out of sight, out of mind. But obsess on something and it consumes you. This is why power elites make a point of directing our focus 24/7.

Social psychologists and marketing experts know very well that we are driven by our perceptions of reality, not by reality itself. As Cialdini pronounced, “What’s focal is causal.” Once the media captures our focus, manipulators can take advantage of “privileged moments” to get us to behave their way.

This human vulnerability has become magnified in the age of social media. False images and memes now flicker like strobe lights through our brains at breakneck speed. The only way to discern reality is to put down the devices and actively seek out what is real from what is perceived. And to ask some real questions, such as: Where exactly is the violence coming from? Are things really as they seem? Are we being hypnotized to echo the constant flickering of this imagery?

Media Collusion with Rioting

An oft-quoted proclamation from Bolshevik power-monger Vladimir Lenin goes like this: “The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses . . . We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth… We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.”

Media elites largely now collude with rioting that serves their agendas. But, as all community organizers understand, it’s nearly useless to try to mobilize people who’ve got productive lives to live and an interest in the world beyond themselves. Such people have family loyalties and strong friendships and no appetite for hatred. They tend to be people who are culturally literate with natural curiosity and a basic grasp of human history, or at least of human nature.

Since love and knowledge and self-reliance stand in the way of totalitarian goals, all of that has to be destroyed. Only by creating the predictable sense of alienation their policies promote can Alinskyites grow their necessary hive of drones.

The End Result: Division and Loneliness

In the end, the war against free speech is a war against conversation and human fellowship. Without free speech, our alienation from one another would become complete. We couldn’t get to ever really know one another once all of our social interactions became regulated. Real friendships would be obstructed.

When “Coming Apart” author Charles Murray was undergoing his tarring and feathering by the mob at Middlebury College that refused to let him speak, he spent some time looking out at the individuals in the mass. He reflected on what he found, especially in how the students mindlessly modeled the behavior of their peers: “Many looked like they had come straight out of casting for a film of brownshirt rallies. In some cases, I can only describe their eyes as crazed and their expressions as snarls. Melodramatic, I know. But that’s what they looked like.”

In fact, they look like kids in the grip of a cult mindset: Lost. Lonely. Deluded. Deceived. Just scan these sad mugshots of Antifa protesters released by the Portland, Oregon police department after they were arrested for violent acts on May Day this year. It’s a collection of faces filled with cluelessness, loss, and delusion. The mugshot of the identified white supremacist who plowed his car into the crowd, killing a woman, fits right in with them.

Finally, consider the young environmental activist Jeff Jacoby wrote about in the Boston Globe recently. She was peer-pressured into a desperate door-to-door attempt to save the planet and ended up sobbing from exhaustion at the reporter’s doorstep: “It gnaws at her to see how angry so many people are these days. She wasn’t raised to hate people whose politics are different from hers, she told us.”

Indeed, this gnaws on all people of goodwill when resentments are rubbed so raw. Yet alienated people are being filled with hatred and deployed to the streets to serve the agendas of political and media elites. Jacoby’s headline states “we are a nation on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” I’d add that because of the gaslighting tactics of power elites, we are actually in the throes of a nervous breakdown.

Categories: "Alt right", "Anti-Fascists", "Right wing extremists", Academia and freedom of speech, Academia and the left, Alinsky, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Civility, Culture of hate, Divided States of America, Freedom of speech, Hate from the left, Lenin, Media and Antifa, Media manipulation, Mob violence, Propaganda, Social engineering, Violence in Charlottesville
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It’s True: Liberals Hate Western Civilization

July 9, 2017

It’s True: Liberals Hate Western Civilization, Power Line, John Hinderaker, July 8, 2017

(Stop calling them “Liberals.” They are leftists and probably proud of it. — DM)

President Trump’s superb speech in Poland has been praised by most observers, including Paul. On the Left, however, Trump’s speech has been criticized for its principal virtue, the president’s spirited defense of Western civilization. Here are some of the many such instances.

Amanda Marcotte writes at Salon: “Trump’s alt-right Poland speech: Time to call his white nationalist rhetoric what it is.”

Trump argued that Western (read: white) nations are “the fastest and the greatest community” and the “world has never known anything like our community of nations.” He crowed about how Westerners (read: white people) “write symphonies,” “pursue innovation” and “always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers,” as if these were unique qualities to white-dominated nations, instead of universal truths of the human race across all cultures.

Why, exactly, should we “read white people”? Trump said not a word about race in his speech. While the peoples that developed Western culture were of course predominantly white, Western civilization is not limited to one race. Just ask, say, Thomas Sowell or Yo-Yo Ma. The obsession with race is the Left’s, not Trump’s.

He also portrayed this Western civilization as under assault from forces “from the South or the East” that “threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are.”
***
And yet, even though Trump was fairly begging to be labeled a fascist with his speech painting the purity of white civilization as under threat from racialized foreigners….

But wait! Doesn’t the threat from the East come from Russia? And aren’t Russians white? On the Left, facts are always secondary, at best, to the Narrative. Finally, this howler:

Breitbart gushed about how Trump was calling for “protecting our borders” and “preserving Western civilization,” and bizarrely compared the speech to Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech, even though the Berlin Wall is the gold standard in the kind of border security and cultural “preservation” that Trump has made his political career calling for.

Great point, Amanda! Just like Trump’s wall on the southern border, the East Germans built the Berlin Wall to keep out the throngs of West Berliners that were trying to get in illegally.

Next, Sarah Wildman at Vox: “Trump’s speech in Poland sounded like an alt-right manifesto.”

In his address, Trump cast the West, including the United States and Europe, on the side of “civilization.” With an undercurrent of bellicosity, he spoke of protecting borders, casting himself as a defender not just of territory but of Western “values.” And, using the phrase he had avoided on his trip to Saudi Arabia, he insisted that in the fight against “radical Islamic terrorism,” the West “will prevail.”

Is this what is meant by “alt-right”? I am so old, I can remember when 95% of Americans would have thought that such propositions verged on the self-evident.

Common Dreams (“Breaking News & Views For the Progressive Community”): “‘Disturbing’ Undertones Detected in Trump’s Bizarre Poland Speech.”

Honing in on Trump’s repeated emphasis on “the will” and his declaration that “our civilization will triumph,” many made connections between the speech and an infamous 1935 Nazi propaganda film titled “Triumph of the Will,” which was directed by Leni Riefenstahl and based on the 1934 Nuremberg Rally.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Peter Beinart in The Atlantic:

In his speech in Poland on Thursday, Donald Trump referred 10 times to “the West” and five times to “our civilization.” His white nationalist supporters will understand exactly what he means. It’s important that other Americans do, too.
***
The West is a racial and religious term. To be considered Western, a country must be largely Christian (preferably Protestant or Catholic) and largely white.

But Israel is pretty universally regarded as Western, and Western values derive largely from Jewish history and culture.

The most shocking sentence in Trump’s speech—perhaps the most shocking sentence in any presidential speech delivered on foreign soil in my lifetime—was his claim that “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” … Trump’s sentence only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious paranoia. … A direct line connects Trump’s assault on Barack Obama’s citizenship to his speech in Poland. In Trump and Bannon’s view, America is at its core Western: meaning white and Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian). The implication is that anyone in the United States who is not white and Christian may not truly be American but rather than an imposter and a threat.

Like Trump’s daughter and son-in-law? Beinart’s rant verges on the insane.

Jonathan Capehart in the Washington Post: “Trump’s white-nationalist dog whistles in Warsaw.”

This is the same crowd that brays about the superiority of “Western civilization” and its contributions in the history of the world conveniently ignores (or perhaps is just plain ignorant about) what we’ve adopted from Muslims and the Middle East. Those symphonies Trump says “We write” (ahem) would be real lame without the influence of the Middle East and Muslims. According to Salim al-Hassani, chairman of the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilization and editor of “1001 Inventions,” which chronicles “the enduring legacy of Muslim civilization,” told CNN years ago that the lute, musical scales and the ancestor of the violin are all part of that legacy.

Carlyn Reichel, former speechwriter for Joe Biden, in Foreign Policy: “Trump Has Reshaped Presidential Rhetoric Into an Unrecognizable Grotesque.”

Like staring into a fun-house mirror, the trappings of an American president delivering a landmark speech abroad were there — certainly there were deliberate echoes of President John F. Kennedy’s historic speech in Berlin — but it was all reshaped into an unrecognizable grotesque.

With each paragraph, strong statements about defending freedom and standing against the forces of oppression were replaced by a narrow vision of the world rooted in an even narrower ideology. For Trump, the boundaries of “civilization” only extend to those who share his definition of “God” and “family” — that is, a Judeo-Christian worldview and power structures that continue to be dominated by white men.

So you can’t celebrate or defend Western civilization without being denounced by liberals as a white nationalist, a fascist, and so on. It is good to know where they stand.

Categories: "Alt right", "Liberals", Leftists, Media and Islam, Media and Trump, Media and Western Civilization, Trump agenda, Trump in Poland
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Right From Wrong: Alt-left delete

November 21, 2016

Right From Wrong: Alt-left delete, Jerusalem Post, Ruthie Blum, November 20, 2016

trumpandbannonThe millions of voters who elected Trump do not deserve the mud-slinging.

The term “alt-right”, which nobody had heard of until the unexpected emergence and rise of Donald Trump in the US presidential election campaign, has become all the rage, literally and figuratively. Indeed, it is now the angry go-to explanation in every analysis of the Republican candidate’s ostensibly miraculous victory on November 8. And it is the key buzzword of the fever-pitched brouhaha surrounding Trump’s appointment of Breitbart publisher Steve Bannon as his chief strategist.

One the main arguments against Bannon – at times a self-described promoter of the alt-right message – is that he, like the neo-Nazi Trump-supporting trolls on Twitter, is an antisemite. Though this is patent nonsense, as the evidence raised to prove it is flimsy at best, it is one of those labels that enables both liberals and anti-Trump conservatives to kill two birds with one stone: Bannon and the man who elevated him to a highly important and coveted post.

The intellectual pitfall for mainstream conservatives here is plain. Whatever their position on Bannon, they are aware that Trump’s stunning victory not only in the race for the Oval Office, but in that of both houses of Congress cannot be attributed to a fringe group of right-wingers with no formal homogeneous ideology. Within this loose category are white supremacists who hate Jews, blacks and gays, and any member of the Right who has a nuanced view of everything from immigration to abortion. But these are a tiny minority in America as a whole, and played less of a role in the election of Trump than they and their detractors would love to imagine.

Others who are lumped into that label are people – like myself – who consider the decline of American power to be a danger both domestically and internationally, and desperately wanted the new style of Democrats – those who radicalized the party of Scoop Jackson into oblivion – out of office. We are right-wingers who believe in individual enterprise and ideological freedom. We believe that the federal government should not be dictating the rules of personal moral engagement or funding our choices. We want academia to be a place for the advanced study of humankind in all its facets and history – a space for the education and maturation of each new generation of young adults who will be faced with the often unpleasant task of making their way in the world with nothing but a set of tools in their satchel to give them a sense of their otherwise good fortune to be doing this in the United States, and not in Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela or Mexico, to name but a few examples.

But mainly we want to preserve all of the things that make America great, while repairing those that prevent it from becoming even better – and not by having politicians tell us what’s good for us. It is we who are charged with spelling out for them what is required when we hire them to represent us. The majority of Americans who feel this way opted to give Trump a chance to make good on his promise to reinvigorate the economy and prevent evil forces from corroding the fiber of a country that causes people from around the globe to want to live in what European Jews fleeing eastern Europe prior to, during and after World War II, used to call the “golden medinah” – a nation where the streets are paved in gold.

It thus seemed like the height of irony that a billionaire who actually gilds his buildings was selected to represent those people whose roads are barely paved at all, let alone in gold. Nevertheless they did, because his message to them was that it’s honorable, not shameful, to strive for the gold medal.

WHERE IMMIGRATION is concerned, the so-called alt-right – whoever comprises it – may believe in sealed borders against the influx of “undesirables,” but neither Trump nor most of his backers hold this view. What we do believe, especially those of us American Jews who moved to Israel for Zionist reasons, is that immigrants should have to go through legal channels and a vetting process. Just as citizens of America and Israel must adhere to the law of the land, so must those who want to become members of those societies. Forcing wannabes to undergo a process of examination and a trial period does not constitute racism, it is simply a necessary procedure. This is particularly true today, as radical Islamists have been infiltrating every country in the world to try and spread a pernicious ideology through the use of mayhem and murder.

Nor is the proposed policy of putting a stop to illegal immigration from Mexico a question of discrimination. On the contrary, it is an assertion that Mexicans, like all other immigrants, Latinos included, who applied for visas, green cards and citizenship, are welcome under certain conditions.

Even Canadians are not allowed simply to cross the border and work in America without going through such channels.

One may not agree with the above, but it is a valid position that has nothing to do with white supremacism. And the millions of voters who elected Trump do not deserve the mud-slinging.

Furthermore, what all anti-Trump conservatives must know in their hearts is that even if Trump had not ended up winning the Republican primary race, the Left would have gone after any of the others in the same fashion. Had Ted Cruz been left standing against Hillary Clinton, he would have received the very same treatment, and had similar, if not identical, epithets hurled at him and his supporters. In addition, the only antisemitic diatribes to which I personally have been exposed on social media are from left-wing radicals, calling me a “dirty Jewess” and “Israeli killer of Palestinian children.” But somehow, when such slurs come from the Left, they are considered expressions of a political viewpoint, rather than what they really are.

In Israel, too, the settler movement and anyone who believes in Jewish rights to the land – as well as those warning against the true aim of the Palestinian leadership – are vilified and likened to the fringe members of the Right who violate laws on behalf of an extreme position held by very few people. As is the case in America, the alt-left in America has a prominent place in the mainstream media and ivory tower, where thought-policing and debate-stifling is the norm. And we right-wingers on both sides of the ocean have had enough.

It is time to acknowledge that it was the alt-left the American voter was responding to when he or she cast a ballot for Trump, not the alt-right.

Categories: 2016 elections, Alt-Left, Alt-Right, Antisemitism, Immigration, Israel
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Are Bannon’s Critics for Real?

November 18, 2016

Are Bannon’s Critics for Real? Front Page Magazine, Paul Gottfried, November 18, 2016

Trying to make sense out of senseless accusations — and an even more absurd double standard.

bannon

I’m beginning this commentary on the recent assaults on Steve Bannon by quoting my response to questions that a CNN-Digital reporter asked me concerning President-elect Trump’s friend and adviser:

There’s no indication that Steve Bannon, the Breitbart executive and Donald Trump adviser, who has been characterized as a white nationalist, is a racist or anti-Semite. Bannon is not a white identitarian or race realist. He comes from the world of Washington politics and journalism, not white identity politics. Although I don’t know the man, I doubt Bannon hangs out with people who burn crosses on other people’s lawns.

I expressed this view, more or less, not only to CNN-Digital. I also expressed it in a phone-call marathon to representatives of a Danish daily and the Jewish Forward and, in an hour and a half German conversation, with an editor of the German conservative weekly Junge Freiheit. In all these exchanges I had to answer the question of whether Steve Bannon was in fact an anti-Semite and racist, a judgment that was coming from, among others, such exemplary American “conservatives” as Glenn Beck, Jonah Goldberg, and writers for the Wall Street Journal. I was also asked whether as the co-inventor of the term “Alternative Right,” which has now been shortened to “Altright,” I could tell if Bannon, who likes the term in question, enjoys the company of “white nationalists.”

I tried to explain that the exceedingly elastic term “Altright” has been claimed by a number of groups that belong to the non-establishment Right. All those on the Right who are at war with the GOP establishment and neoconservative politics and who are combatting PC with particular ferocity have embraced the designation “Altright.” This is especially true of Millennials who scorn establishmentarian positions.  But it’s not at all clear to me that those who write for Bannon’s website publication, some of whom are Orthodox Jews, have much to do with white identitarians who also use the term “Altright.” I would doubt that these writers go out to drink with the Philonazi blogger Matt Heimbach, who also claims the Altright moniker.

Like David Horowitz, David Goldman, Rudolf Giuliani, and dozens of other commentators, I find the charges leveled against Bannon to be outrageous slander. I am also horrified by the double standard in play when Bannon, who may or may not have complained to a now divorced wife about Jewish students in a private school, is depicted as the reincarnation of Hitler. At the same time, attacks on Jews or other ethnic groups coming from the Left are given short shrift by the media.

Disparaging descriptions of blacks, Latinos, and Catholics that have emanated from Hillary’s staff (and which have been revealed by Wikileak) occasioned a yawn from the mass media here and in Europe. And so has Hillary’s hateful obscenity about her husband’s Jewish campaign manager, which has never received the same critical scrutiny as Steve Bannon’s totally fictitious anti-Semitism and racism. What would happen to Bannon’s or any Republican’s career if, like Hillary, he referred to someone as a “f-cking Jew bastard”? Presumably that person would not be the darling of the media establishment and the presidential candidate of George H.W. Bush, Robert Kagan, Max Boot and Alan Dershowitz.

I intend to raise these questions the next time someone calls on me as an expert on the Altright who can document Steve Bannon’s possible connection to neo-Nazi websites. Perhaps the interviewers would be interested in knowing what Hillary and John Podesta said about certain groups. Even more relevant, they might want me to explain how it came to pass that the Democratic National Committee is about to nominate as its new director Congressman Keith Ellison, a Muslim convert and close friend of Louis Farrakhan. Ellison is entirely explicit in his anti-white and anti-Jewish views and unlike Bannon, does not require reinvention to be turned into what he’s not. The fact that Ellison is heartily endorsed by such presumed idealists as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is not likely to hurt the reputations of either social justice warrior.

But one must wonder what would happen to a Republican politician who praised David Duke as warmly as Warren and Sanders have extolled the firebrand Keith Ellison. Why are the Black Muslims less distasteful racists than the white supremacist Duke, who by the way quit the Ku Klux Klan decades ago but who remains a code word for (Republican) racism? Or why does Al Sharpton remain a respected confidant of Democratic political leaders, after leading a black race riot against Jewish merchants in Harlem and after engaging in other demagogic incitements to racial violence. (All of Sharpton’s misdeeds are meticulously listed and documented in Carl Horowitz’s Sharpton: The Rise of a Demagogue.)

Meanwhile Steve Bannon is condemned internationally for having possibly said, at least according to an estranged wife, that he objected to spoiled Jewish students in a private school? Perhaps the kids there were spoiled. Why should I even care what he said on this subject, if he really said it?  Another accusation leveled against Bannon is that he allowed Bill Kristol, who made a fetish of belittling Donald Trump, to be attacked as a “renegade Jew.” But that charge, hardly a proof of anti-Semitism, came from the fervently pro-Israeli David Horowitz. In a recent comment Horowitz laments that the “Left has lost touch with the American people.”

Given the Left’s ridiculous double standards, one has to wonder on what planet the Left and the rest of Bannon’s haters are standing.

Categories: Alt-Right, Democrat Party and media, Steven K. Bannon
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The Alt-Right is Coming! Hillary Shrieks.

August 27, 2016

The Alt-Right is Coming! Hillary Shrieks. Front Page Magazine, Matthew Vadum, August 26, 2016

hilshreiks

After a terrible week on the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton lashed out at her Republican opponent yesterday as – surprise, surprise – a racist.

But this time, she claims, Donald Trump is backed by a nasty, racist “alt-right” conspiracy that aspires to lynch blacks and Muslims and that laughs at feminist idiocy.

When in doubt, scream “racist!”

That has been Democrats’ rule of thumb since their party’s image took a huge hit when Democrat senators fought the Civil Rights Act of 1964 tooth and nail. Ultimately, the legislation only passed when Republican senators put it over the top.

In her speech in Reno, Nev., the former secretary of state assailed the allegedly racist “alt-right” or “Alternative Right” movement, which she claims Trump champions. It is old wine in a new bottle. Clinton hopes to portray Trump as really, really, really scary – even scarier than he was a few days ago! – because this supposedly sinister new force is backing him.

The proof of alt-right ascendancy in the Republican Party, she said, is the fact Trump “hired Stephen Bannon, the head of a right-wing website called Breitbart.com, as campaign CEO.” (Disclosure: I’ve written many articles for Breitbart.)

Clinton said:

It’s truly hard to believe, but according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, Breitbart embraces “ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right.”

This is not conservatism as we have known it. This is not Republicanism as we have know it. These are race-baiting ideas, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas, anti-woman –– all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right.’

               Now Alt-Right is short for “Alternative Right.”

The Wall Street Journal describes it as a loose but organized movement, mostly online, that “rejects mainstream conservatism, promotes nationalism and views immigration and multiculturalism as threats to white identity.”

The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump campaign represents a landmark achievement for the “Alt-Right.” A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party.

Not so fast, Hillary.

Alt-right is so new to the American political scene that it is difficult to describe it.

The alt-right that Clinton smears as racist may be more accurately described as a right-leaning, anti-establishment, grassroots movement whose supporters are sick and tired of being betrayed by weak-kneed Republican politicians.

In other words, much of what the alt-right embraces is tactical rather than ideological. It’s edgy and hard-hitting and its proponents like to make a splash. Many of its supporters are markedly younger than traditional conservatives. Alt-right people, who are not all Caucasians, are against open borders and affirmative action; some want trade restrictions imposed, a position mostly eschewed by conservatives in recent decades. The alt-right, unlike much of the conservative movement establishment and the GOP, strenuously avoids accepting the premises of the Left. They’re generally smart, media-savvy, and effective. They reject political correctness and they’re not easily intimidated.

Yes, there are some racist Internet trolls, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis that are attempting to attach themselves to this movement, but they don’t define it. If these people want to call themselves alt-right and pretend that they are, there is not much anyone can do about it.

A few days before his untimely death in 2012, Breitbart.com founder Andrew Breitbart lectured Bill Maher about how destructive it is to call someone a racist. “There’s nothing in this country that’s a worse accusation,” he said. “In America, if you accuse somebody of racism, that person has to disprove that. It’s completely un-American …”

But Clinton can’t help it. She’s being doing it for too long. Now she is building up a boogeyman so she can tear it down. She hopes to make alt-right a swear word and make it stick to Trump.

To this end, her campaign released an inflammatory video containing Ku Klux Klan members saying nice things about Trump. The fact that the KKK thinks highly of Trump is proof he is a threat to the republic, according to Hillary.

Two can play at that game of guilt by association.

The Communist Party USA embraces Hillary, saying “[o]n all the major democratic issues and demands, i.e. collective bargaining rights, racial and gender equity, climate change, immigration reform, etc., Clinton is on the right side.”

Will Quigg, Grand Dragon of the California KKK, endorsed Clinton in March. “We want Hillary Clinton to win,” Quigg said. “She is telling everybody one thing, but she has a hidden agenda.”

Incidentally, Clinton hailed a former Ku Klux Klan recruiter when he died in 2010 as a “friend and mentor,” saying he was a man of “surpassing eloquence and nobility.” She was referring to the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) who filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Byrd had at one time referred to black Americans as “race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.” Even in his later years Byrd, this man who was an inspirational figure to Clinton, remained a fan of the N-word.

Seddique Mateen, the Taliban-supporting father of mass-murdering Muslim terrorist Omar Mateen, endorsed Clinton, calling her “good for the United States versus Donald Trump, who has no solutions.” In June Mateen’s late son killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., after repeatedly declaring his allegiance to Islamic State.

Other Hillary endorsers include unrepentant Nazi collaborator George Soros, self-described “communist” and “rowdy black nationalist” Van Jones, racial arsonist and riot-starter Al Sharpton, porn pioneer Larry Flynt, admitted child molester Lena Dunham, and Viet Cong admirer Jane Fonda.

You can’t choose your supporters. They choose you. Sometimes they reflect what you stand for; sometimes they don’t.

In her oration, Clinton accused Trump of doing what she and just about all Democratic officeholders at the federal level do every day.

“Everywhere I go, people tell me how concerned they are by the divisive rhetoric coming from my opponent in this election. And I understand that concern, because it’s like nothing we’ve heard before from a nominee for president of the United States from one of our two major parties.”

Conservatives know that President Obama, who, like Clinton, is an in-your-face Alinskyite, smears his adversaries more or less every day. He compares Republicans to the murderous mullahs in Tehran and condemns cops for this phantom the Left calls systemic racism.

In 2008 Obama attacked gun owners and churchgoers in his “bitter clingers” speech, told his comrades “if they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” and urged supporters to argue with their neighbors and “get in their face.” In 2009 Obama said that police “acted stupidly” when they arrested his personal friend in Cambridge, Mass. The next year he urged Latinos to “punish” their “enemies.”

This is not an exhaustive list of the current president’s divisive, insulting rhetoric.

Clinton assailed Trump for building “his campaign on prejudice and paranoia” and “taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over the Republican Party.”

Trump, she said, “is reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters.” She continued:

“A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far, dark reaches of the Internet, should never run our government or command our military.”

Such chutzpah. This comes from the woman who coined the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy” and whose campaign routinely deflects attacks on her by labeling them conspiracy theories, whether the attacks are related to her lethal bungling of the terrorist attack in Benghazi, the email scandal, her failing health, or the bribe processing center known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

She attacked Trump for “leading the charge for the so-called ‘Birthers.’” Trump “promoted the racist lie that President Obama is not really an American citizen – part of a sustained effort to delegitimize America’s first black president,” adding that with Trump there has been “a steady stream of bigotry.”

Of course it is a well-established fact that her 2008 campaign spread rumors Obama was born overseas. And Obama himself is the original birther. He allowed promotional material from a publisher to claim he “was born in Kenya.”

Hillary accused Trump of anti-Semitism, repeating the lie that “his campaign famously posted an anti-Semitic image – a Star of David imposed over a sea of dollar bills – that first appeared on a white supremacist websites.”

But it’s not actually a Star of David that appears in the graphic to which Clinton refers. The actual Star of David appears on the Israeli flag because it has over time come to be considered exclusively a Jewish symbol. The figure on the poster is an opaque six-pointed star or hexagram that is closer to a sheriff’s badge. A Star of David, by contrast, is a hexagram formed by compounding two equilateral triangles and it is translucent, i.e. not filled in. In any event, nobody can credibly claim Trump is anti-Semitic. He hasn’t said anything that is anti-Semitic. His daughter married a Jew, became a Jew, and gave birth to Jews and Trump was fine with all of it.

Hillary didn’t mention that her party has formally endorsed the violent, racist Black Lives Matter movement and that she has said wonderful things about.

And for the remaining days of the campaign cycle, my guess is she won’t.

Categories: 2016 elections, Alt-Right, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Racism
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