Feminist critic shot

 

Tragic news last weekend. One of the world’s leading men’s rights lawyers, Marc Angelucci, was shot dead outside his home in Los Angeles. Police investigations are underway, but no details are yet available regarding the circumstances of the murder.

His death is a huge loss. Marc was the most extraordinary, brilliant, and utterly tireless advocate for men. He’d spent decades battling and winning high profile cases including challenging unfair treatment for male domestic violence victims, he’d helped draft and enact legislation to stop paternity fraud, testified before judicial committees, and won a series of key cases overturning male-only draft registration.

Those of you who have seen Cassie Jaye’s movie, The Red Pill, will have seen Marc discussing some of his big cases. Marc also spoke at the International Conference on Men’s Issues at the Gold Coast in 2017 – which was where I first met him, although I was lucky enough to sit with him at Cassie Jaye’s wedding in June, 2018 where I so enjoyed his endearingly warm, open manner, and enthusiasm for the many causes we had in common. We are pictured here with Warren Farrell.  

Yesterday the National Coalition for Men, where Marc was Vice-President, published a tribute which summarised many of his lasting achievements but noted also those striking personal qualities:  “Marc was a man full of joy and love, a true pleasure to know for all of us fortunate enough to be able to call him our colleague and/or friend. If Marc Etienne Angelucci didn’t exist, we would need to invent him, though honestly the man so far exceeded any dreams any of us could possibly have for an unbelievable combination of shining personal qualities and amazing professional achievements. While wildly successful on the legal front, he was a fabulously down-to-earth, loving man.”

Late last year I finally managed to persuade Marc, a man who was always snowed under with work, to do a podcast with me. I hope you will have a chance to listen to it now and hear this truly inspiring individual talk with such passion about his fight for fair treatment for men.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph2rt71C1xg

From Bettina Arndt newsletter:  newsletter@bettinaarndt.com.au






Obama Granted Clemency to Terrorists and Traitors, But Democrats Are Angry About Roger Stone


I wonder if the Homburg hat was a deliberate provocation to the Donks.  It is old-fashioned and hence conservative these days

Soon after it was announced that President Trump had commuted the prison sentence of Roger Stone, the outrage mob mobilized. Nancy Pelosi went on CNN to suggest that a law should be passed limiting the president’s clemency powers.

“There ought to be a law, and I’m recommending we pass a law that presidents cannot issue a pardon if the crime that the person is in jail for is one that is caused by protecting the president, which this was. It’s appalling,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

Adam Schiff couldn’t help invoking the debunked Trump/Russia theory when he responded. “Stone lied and intimidated witnesses to hide Trump’s exploitation of the Russian hack of his opponent’s campaign,” he tweeted. “With Trump there are now two systems of justice in America: One for Trump’s criminal friends and one for everyone else.” Cory Booker echoed the same talking point in his own tweet, “There should not be two justice systems in the U.S.—we can and we must do better.”

This is hardly the first time Democrats have claimed to be outraged at Trump’s acts of clemency. Last year, President Trump granted full pardons for Army First Lt. Clint Lorance and Army Maj. Mathew Golsteyn, who’d been accused of war crimes for taking actions to defend themselves on the battlefield.  Yet, when President Trump pardoned them, it immediately sparked controversy and outrage.  Earlier this year, Trump commuted the sentence of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, once again, sparking outrage from Democrats and calls for investigations.

But, these same people who pounced on Trump’s acts of clemency yawned and looked the other when Barack Obama commuted the sentence of terrorists and traitors.

Just before leaving office in 2017, Barack Obama commuted the sentence of Bradley Manning (you may also know him as Chelsea), who leaked hundreds of thousands of sensitive government documents to WikiLeaks. A traitor in every sense, in 2013 Manning was convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison. But, Bradley Manning became a hero of the political left for declaring himself to be transgender, and Obama made his controversial commutation literally just days before leaving office. Manning maintains hero status amongst the left today.

Obama also commuted the sentence of convicted terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera, the leader of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña (FALN), a Puerto Rican terrorist group. FALN was responsible for 130 attacks in the United States, and at least six deaths. An unrepentant Lopez-Rivera was serving a 70-year sentence when Obama set him free. The Congressional Black Caucus had repeatedly lobbied for Lopez’s release during the Obama years, and the commutation was met with praise from Democrats like Bill de Blasio, Congressman Luis Gutiérrez, Bernie Sanders, and others.

Obama also granted clemency to hundreds of drug offenders he claimed were non-violent offenders who deserved a second chance, because of racism or something. It later came out that many of the people he released were actually violent offenders guilty of gun crimes. Obama granted more acts of clemency than any president since Truman, though he saved much of that executive use of power for the latter months and days of his presidency.

I’m sure there were some individuals Obama granted clemency to who legitimately deserved it, but who in their right mind believes granting clemency to an unrepentant terrorist or a traitor responsible for the biggest national security breach in history was just?

Roger Stone was caught up in a bogus investigation over bogus allegations of Russian collusion, but Democrats would rather see him in jail than the leader of a terrorist group responsible for the deaths of American citizens. In Obama’s system of justice, all it takes to above the law is to claim to be a victim of racism, an unrepentant terrorist, or transgender.

SOURCE 





‘White Supremacy’ Is the New ‘Homophobia’

My purpose in this article is not to compare “white supremacy” to “homophobia.” Nor is it to deny the existence of white supremacists. Instead, my purpose is to expose tactics of intimidation, shaming, and manipulation. In that regard, “white supremacy” is the new “homophobia.”

Allow me to explain.

The term homophobia can be traced back to George Weinberg, “a psychotherapist who, in the mid-1960s, observed the discomfort that some of his colleagues exhibited around gay men and women and invented a word to describe it.”

As Dr. Weinberg explained, “I coined the word homophobia to mean it was a phobia about homosexuals. It was a fear of homosexuals which seemed to be associated with a fear of contagion, a fear of reducing the things one fought for — home and family. It was a religious fear, and it had led to great brutality, as fear always does.”

But in the years following, the terms homophobia and homophobe became weaponized, used as offensive weapons in the culture wars.

If you opposed same-sex “marriage,” you were a homophobe.

If you believed a child deserved a mother and a father, you were a homophobe.

If you affirmed the teachings of the Bible, you were a homophobe.

And if you were a homophobe you were also a bigot, a hater, a bad person, even a Nazi.

What fair-minded, decent person would want to described like that? And who wants to have a phobia?

It’s the same today with the terms “white supremacy” and “white supremacist.”

Initially, they were used to describe people who openly believed in the supremacy of the white race over other races.

In American history, they were slave traders and segregationists. They were the KKK of the past and the alt-right of today. (According to the ADL, “Alt right, short for ‘alternative right,’ is a repackaging of white supremacy by extremists seeking to mainstream their ideology.”)

White supremacists have also been antisemites, Holocaust deniers, neo-Nazis, and members of the skinhead subculture.

White supremacy is ugly and bad, and no decent, fair-minded would want to be called a white supremacist.

That’s why these terms, just like homophobia and homophobe, have been weaponized today.

If you are a Trump supporter, you are a white supremacist.

If you differ with any part of the BLM movement, you are a white supremacist.

If you resist the mob, you are a white supremacist.

If you don’t believe in reparations, you are a white supremacist. After all, if you were not a white supremacist, why would you resist reparations?

If you don’t agree with tearing down statutes of Washington and Jefferson, you’re a white supremacist. After all, they owned slaves, so if you want to honor their legacy, you must be a white supremacist.

The “logic” is irresistible.

If you simply do not believe that America today is, by and large, a white supremacist nation, then you are a white supremacist. Your very denial of white supremacy is proof that you are a white supremacist.

And if you are a white Christian conservative, by default, you are a white supremacist.

On March 15, 2018, I tweeted, “I’m a little suspicious whenever left-leaning Christians raise charges against white evangelicals — who just happen to be strong social conservatives.”

In response, Ashton wrote, “This political right-wing Christianity isn't Christianity. It's white cultural supremacy shamefully using Jesus as a shield. Repent @DrMichaeILBrown and @ericmetaxas.” (For related accusations, see here.)

There you have it. If you’re a Christian-based social conservative you are part of the political right wing. And if you are part of the political right wing, you are a white supremacist. And since you claim to be a Christian, you are “using Jesus as a shield.”

To be sure, this is just one tweet. But it expresses common talking points. And it follows the standard strategy of trying to shame one’s opponents into silence.

In the recent past (and until today), the tactic was to brand everyone who opposed any facet of LGBTQ activism a homophobe. Do you have a problem with drag queens reading to toddlers? You’re a homophobe! You don’t want first-graders learning the definition of gender-queer? You’re a hater and a bigot. Homophobe!

Now, if you like President Trump’s Mt. Rushmore speech, it’s because you’re a white supremacist.

Forget the fact that he said, “We believe in equal opportunity, equal justice, and equal treatment for citizens of every race, background, religion, and creed.  Every child, of every color — born and unborn — is made in the holy image of God.”

Or that he said, “Our opponents would tear apart the very documents that Martin Luther King used to express his dream, and the ideas that were the foundation of the righteous movement for Civil Rights.”

Or that he said, “We must demand that our children are taught once again to see America as did Reverend Martin Luther King, when he said that the Founders had signed ‘a promissory note’ to every future generation.  Dr. King saw that the mission of justice required us to fully embrace our founding ideals.  Those ideals are so important to us — the founding ideals.  He called on his fellow citizens not to rip down their heritage, but to live up to their heritage.”

It doesn’t matter. The speech was delivered at the foot of Mt. Rushmore, a monument to white supremacy, by a white supremacist president. That says it all.

It doesn’t matter that Trump said that “we are the country” of black heroes like Frederick Douglass.  And the Tuskegee Airmen. And Harriet Tubman. And Jesse Owens. And Ella Fitzgerald.

Or that Trump announced that he will establish a National Garden of American Heroes, including “leaders of the abolitionist movement” and “the first all-volunteer African-American regiment of the Union Army in the Civil War.” Individual statues would be devoted to Douglass, King, and Tubman, as well as Jackie Robinson.

It doesn’t matter. If you support this National Garden, you are a white supremacist. Obviously!

Along with other commentators, I have pointed to the current misuse of the term “white supremacy.” But it’s important that we compare it to the use of “homophobia,” which continues to be an effective tactic for labeling and silencing those who differ.

Let’s catch this early. Let’s expose it. And let’s reserve the term “white supremacy” for those who deserve it.

SOURCE 





Liberal’s All-Out Assault On Free Speech

In 1964, comedian Lenny Bruce was convicted in New York City on obscenity charges. It wasn’t for anything he did, it was for what he said…while doing stand-up comedy. It seems absurd now that an American could face jail time, as did the owner of the comedy club where he’d uttered the offending words (he was sentenced to four months in prison but died of an overdose while appealing the case).

What destroyed Lenny Bruce has ultimately destroyed itself - those words are now commonplace on basic cable television, and sometimes broadcast networks. The words were “banned” by social conservatives at a time when nearly everyone in power was what would have been called a social conservative. Societal norms were that you not only shouldn’t say those words in public, but you couldn’t.

There was no real pushback, by politicians anyway, against the restrictions. “Liberal” celebrities spoke out in support of Bruce, but his conviction stood until he was posthumously pardoned by then New York Governor George Pataki in 2003.

While the “conservatives” at the time were the ones imposing penalties on speech, it’s now the liberals seeking to do the same, and worse.

The idea of criminalizing so-called “hate speech” has been popular with college-aged liberals for a while now. While normal people laughed at those stupid college kids needing safe spaces when someone was on campus saying things they didn’t agree with and requiring “trigger warnings” before engaging in normal human conversations on subject that might cause them to need a diaper change, liberals were busy looking for an opportunity to use this childishness to their advantage. They found it…by becoming them.

Adults, chronologically anyway, began embracing what they should have grown out of and joined the outrage mob. Ideological corporations like CNN and MSNBC took up the cause of being the nation’s tattletale, tracking down people who’d posted things deemed impure of thought by the progressive left and exposing them, leaving it to the mob to inform employers in the hopes of ruining lives.

This Nazi tactic has been institutionalized by groups like Media Matters (which is somehow a tax-exempt non-profit) and Sleeping Giants. Sleeping Giants exists explicitly to enforce conformity of speech in public. They go after websites publishing unacceptable words and have damaged many by getting cowardly corporations to block out their ability to sell ads.

While it seems like these fascists are on the ascension, and in many quarters they are, they are also suffering from what always plagues leftists – greed and jealously.

Who would’ve thought there was so much money in advocating for the poor and oppressed? There is.

The admitted Marxists who run Black Lives Matter are raking in the cash. ANTIFA leaders aren’t missing any meals. Al Sharpton has a TV show in addition to his race-baiting extortion racket. All manner of grievance grifters are starting organizations and milking moneyed liberal suckers hoping to prove their purity, show that they’re “allies,” to avoid the rage for anything they may have said or done in the past that could be deemed unacceptable now. It’s a profitable scam, with tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars sifting through the hands (bank accounts) of these “leaders.”

But with money and power comes the greed to control it and the source of its power (the mob), and jealously over who gets that control and the attention that accompanies it.

A group of leftists signed a letter this week begging for permission to continue to speak their minds. They weren’t seeking approval to disagree in the way normal people think of the word -- they all agree with progressive dogma -- they just differ on tactics and degrees of government control. These “intellectuals” even framed their letter as an attack on President Trump, in the hope that their show of solidarity with purists would give them some leeway and forgiveness should they ever run afoul of the mob. It didn’t work.

The signatories were denounced as “rich, mostly white” apostates. In the tradition of begging for mercy, shown during the Maoist purge called the Cultural Revolution, the slightest pushback was met with denunciations. Some signatories renounced their own actions, which were little more than a pleading to be able to think.

Nothing in that letter was a defense of conservatives who experience violence when invited to speak on college campuses. None of it could have remotely be read as an embrace of free and open debate or a defense of the concept of free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. It was the equivalent of asking to be allowed to support a “public option” in Obamacare rather than a full government takeover of health care – simply a matter of degrees.

That wasn’t good enough. If you are a 99.9 percent ally of the left, you are their 100 percent enemy. Even asking for the leeway to possibly, at some point in the future, be allowed to deviate on a potential issue (which was what the letter was really doing) was not good enough.

There were calls for firings, public pressure brought to silence signers, and a second letter, this one by other liberals arguing that the first letter deserves scorn because it wasn’t woke on the right issues.

Here are a few choice passages from this second, much longer, letter denouncing the ability to disagree, marginally, with fellow leftists:

“In truth, Black, brown, and LGBTQ+ people — particularly Black and trans people — can now critique elites publicly and hold them accountable socially; this seems to be the letter’s greatest concern.”

“The letter reads as a caustic reaction to a diversifying industry — one that’s starting to challenge institutional norms that have protected bigotry. The writers of the letter use seductive but nebulous concepts and coded language to obscure the actual meaning behind their words, in what seems like an attempt to control and derail the ongoing debate about who gets to have a platform.”

“The signatories claim that “books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity.” This could be a reference to American Dirt, a book by Jeanine Cummins — a non-Mexican white woman who recently began identifying as Puerto Rican — about a Mexican bookseller, which was roundly criticized by Latinx writers and authors like Myriam Gurba and Los Angeles Times writer Esmeralda Bermudez.”

These are just a few, but the whole thing is worthy of mockery.

It ends the way every progressive declaration does – in a woke-off, with participants trying to out-victim each other. “Their letter seeks to uphold a ‘stifling atmosphere’ and prioritizes signal-blasting their discomfort in the face of valid criticism. The intellectual freedom of cis white intellectuals has never been under threat en masse, especially when compared to how writers from marginalized groups have been treated for generations. In fact, they have never faced serious consequences — only momentary discomfort.”

Over at Sleeping Giants, a woman named Nandini Jammi announced she was leaving the fascistic sect she co-founded not because she suddenly realized they were everything they’d claimed to be campaigning against, she quit to form her own group because she wasn’t getting enough credit for their group’s “successes.”

The subtitle of her resignation column is, “How my white male co-founder gaslighted me out of the movement we built together.”

Jammi’s beef is about attention and power, probably money too. Someone’s funding this stuff. With her own group, she controls all of it.

Each of these intrasquad slap-fights are akin to the fight between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks – two sides of the same coin hoping to be the ones wielding the sword of power over everyone else. They want to be the arbiters of what is acceptable and what isn’t and be able to punish accordingly. They want to decide what can and cannot be said, and what happens if you cross their blurry, ever-moving line of conformity.

These are dangerous people, all of them. Their impulses and ideology are totalitarian. That they demand and obtain the ruination of heretics without the power government under their control, just imagine what they’d do with it.

People never believed Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and other leftists were as fanatical as the signs indicated they were or that they’d go as far as they did in the last century and were horrified to learn they were wrong. When someone tells you who they are, believe them – especially when it’s horrible.

Lenny Bruce would still be arrested today, not because his words were obscene, but because they offended the sensibilities of leftists. That they’re eating their own now, when they expect to obtain power in the fall, think about how hungry they’ll be if they win and the rest of us are the only meal around.

SOURCE 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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