Communism just beneath the surface in Sanders campaign

An undercover operative for Project Veritas has filmed a rabid Bernie Sanders field organizer who claims that "cities will burn" if President Trump is reelected this year, and that Trump supporters will need to be reeducated in literal gulags, similar to what Germany did to 'Nazified' Germans after World War II.

"Do you even think, that some of these, like, MAGA people could be "re-educated?" asks the Veritas journalist in a preview of Tuesday's exposé

"We gotta try, so like, in Nazi Germany after the fall of the Nazi party, there was a shit-ton of the populace that was fucking Nazi-fied," said field organizer Kyle Jurek.

"Germany had to spend billions of dollars re-educating their fucking people to not be nazis. Like, we're probably going to have to do the same thing here," he added. "That's kind of what all Bernie's whole fucking like "Hey, free education for everybody - because we're going to have to teach you not to be a fucking Nazi""

Jurek went on to explain "there's a reason Joseph Stalin had gulags," adding "And actually, gulags were a lot better than what the CIA has told us that they were. Like, people were actually paid a living wage in gulags, they had conjugal visits in gulags, gulags were actually meant for like re-education."

The Sanders organizer also predicts violence if Bernie doesn't get the Democratic nomination, and that "Milwaukee will burn."

SOURCE  




Impeachment: do Republicans have more fun?

Ann Coulter

Impeachments aren’t what they used to be. Today, young people are supposed to be excited that the president withheld taxpayer money from Ukraine –- a half-billion-dollar foreign aid package that ticks off most Americans under any circumstances, going to a country notable for not being our country, and for a purpose other than the wall.

Now, Bill Clinton –- that was an impeachment!

First, there was the corpus delicti of the case -- a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, earning her “presidential kneepads” by sexually servicing the president.

The telephonic evidence wasn’t about “Burisma Holdings Limited” or a Ukrainian prosecutor whose name no one can remember. It was tapes of Monica blathering on and on about servicing the president, including such fascinating items as:

-- Clinton couldn’t remember Monica’s name after their first two sexual encounters;

-- Monica’s suggestion to Clinton that she be named “assistant to the president for b--- jobs";

-- Her description of the presidential member (“think of a thumb”).

On Jan. 17, 1998, The Drudge Report broke the intern story. The following week, Clinton gave an impassioned, finger-wagging, squint-eyed address to the nation, saying:

“I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman -- Miss Lewinsky.”

Clinton spent the next seven months dragging the country through his lies, followed by the unraveling of his lies, then more lies, followed by more unraveling.

By late summer, it turned out Monica had, in fact, kept the long-rumored “blue dress” with Clinton’s semen on it. The president was ordered to produce a sample of his DNA. It was one of many presidential “firsts" under Clinton.

A few weeks after producing his DNA, Clinton addressed the nation: "Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate."

Contrary to the bilge put out by the legacy media ever since their baby boomer, draft-dodging, pot-smoking, Fleetwood Mac-listening president was caught committing numerous, serious felonies, Clinton was not impeached for having a sexual affair (as hilarious as that was).

He was impeached for his repeated perjuries and subornation of perjury in a citizen’s private civil rights suit against him.

In May 1994, Paula Jones had brought a lawsuit against Clinton under the 1964 Civil Rights Act -- once considered more sacred than any other legislation passed in the 20th century. That law prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, including sexual harassment.

Jones alleged that, when Clinton was the governor of Arkansas –- a phrase that still has a rather disreputable ring to it -- he had summoned her, a lowly state employee, to his hotel room, dropped his pants and said, “Kiss it.”

To prove her case, Jones had a right to collect evidence to show that he had made similar sexual advances toward other female underlings. This had been expressly confirmed by the Supreme Court’s May 27, 1997, unanimous ruling that her lawsuit could proceed without delay. (The court’s 9-0 ruling surprised every TV lawyer, but one.)

So Clinton lied. He lied to the country, to his Cabinet and, most important, to the court -- under oath in a deposition presided over by federal judge Susan Webber Wright. (I’d add “to his wife,” but no one thinks she was fooled.)

During his deposition on Jan. 17, 1998, for example, Clinton gave these answers to Jones’ lawyers:

Q: At any time were you and Monica Lewinsky alone together in the Oval Office?

A: I don’t recall.

Q: At any time have you and Monica Lewinsky ever been alone together in any room in the White House?

A: I have no specific recollection.

The president had had Monica perform oral sex on him in the White House a half-dozen times, including while he was taking calls from members of Congress. On Easter Sunday, he'd sodomized her with a cigar. He’d just spent months orchestrating a massive campaign to ensure Monica would submit a perjurious affidavit to Jones’ attorneys, such as asking Vernon Jordan to arrange a job for her at Revlon in New York City.

To say that he “had no specific recollection” of being alone with Monica is blinding, inarguable perjury.

Liberals sneer that Clinton merely “lied about sex.” If it’s OK to “lie about sex,” then we can’t have laws about sex. No laws against sexual harassment, rape, child molestation, human trafficking, prostitution. (Oh sorry -- I think I just listed the entire Democratic platform.)

Those are all “just about sex”!

That’s why Clinton heatedly insisted that his testimony was “legally accurate,” saying, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” Perjury is a very serious crime.

The Supreme Court sure thought so! (This is in contrast to the entire Democratic Party: Not a single Democrat voted against Clinton in the Senate impeachment trial, despite his screamingly obvious perjuries.)

Clinton’s first State of the Union address following his Senate trial happened to be the last one of his presidency. The entire Supreme Court boycotted the event. Even the two justices he’d appointed! The court’s gigantic message to the felon was conveyed to the sergeant-at-arms in a terse, two-sentence note expressing regrets.

We can’t have a legal system if people feel free to lie under oath.

Idiots keep announcing on TV that all impeachments are “political,” which they understand to mean “partisan.” No –- that’s not what it means.

As Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist 65, impeachable offenses are “political” in the sense that they are attacks on the body politic -- “injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

It doesn’t get much more injurious to a “nation of laws, not men” than to have the president of the United States perjuring himself over and over and over again in a citizen’s Supreme Court-approved lawsuit against him.

You see, kids? That was an impeachment!

SOURCE 





'Anti-woke bad boy' or 'contemptuous' and privileged white male?

Laurence Fox's Question Time slanging match with an ethnicity lecturer over Meghan Markle has sent Twitter into a melt down.

The 41-year-old accused Rachel Boyle, an academic at Edge Hill University on Merseyside, of 'being racist' after she called him 'a white privileged male' for denying the Duchess of Sussex was hounded from Britain for being mixed-race.

The star of ITV drama Lewis and former husband of actress Billie Piper has divided Twitter with some hailing him as a 'hero' and 'bang on the money' with others slamming him as 'contemptuous'.

John Hooper wrote: 'I don’t know much about Laurence Fox, but he’s fast turning into a hero of mine' while Edd Lees added: 'Laurence Fox is the hero we never knew we needed.'

David Gould added: 'Thank god for people like Laurence Fox and Piers Morgan, talking common sense in an increasingly mad world.'

Others condemned Fox's views. Maggie Rankin said: 'I’m no regular watcher of #bbcqt but it’s rare I’d rather listen to the Tory representative than the non-politician/journalist.  'Laurence Fox came across as really contemptuous. If you don’t want your views scrutinised, don’t go on this programme.'

A Twitter user who goes by the name Barhamm said: 'Oh dear. A white and privileged actor sings about being white and a victim of oppression?! You couldn't make it up. Fox has.'

Fox today quoted Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech following his appearance on the programme and goaded critics about loving their 'leftist tears' and 'giggling at their expense'.

He shared an excerpt of Dr King's 1963 speech about living in a nation where children 'will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character'. 

He said: 'This is the position I took last night and I live by in life. If you can improve on it, I’m all ears. Or you can keep screeching “Racist!” at me and I can carry on having a jolly good giggle at your expense. The tide is turning'.

His opponent Ms Boyle said today she's 'not a**sed' about the row and tweeted: 'Fell out with @LozzaFox (not a***d), upset a (majority white) audience (not a***d) but called the treatment of Meghan Markle what it is "racism". Thank you to @bbcquestiontime for having me'.

Laurence couldn't cope with what he was hearing and looked like he was banging his head on a desk    +12
Laurence couldn't cope with what he was hearing and looked like he was banging his head on a desk

Ms Boyle has appeared on BBC Breakfast as a newspaper reviewer and describes herself on social media as a university lecturer researching race and ethnicity.

Rachel Boyle: 'The problem we've got with this is that Meghan has agreed to be Harry's wife and then the Press have torn her to pieces. Let's be really clear about what this is – let's call it by its name, it's racism, she's a black woman and she has been torn to pieces.'

She was jeered as she called Mr Fox, a QT panellist in Liverpool last night, 'a white privileged male' when he denied her claims and said Britain is 'the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe.'

He shot back at her: ''Oh my God. I can't help what I am, I was born like this, it's an immutable characteristic: to call me a white privileged male is to be racist - you're being racist'.

Mr Fox was visibly exasperated by their exchange last night, first looking to the sky in despair and then appearing to bang his head on the desk.

He also blasted climate change hypocrisy by 'lecturing' stars and the Labour leadership contest, where he made the audience giggle when he nicknamed Jeremy Corbyn 'magic grandpa'.

And after being asked about if he had sympathy for the Sussexes he added: 'Surely Harry should have had a chat with Meghan at some point and said: 'By the way this is going to be misery and you don't have to marry me if you don't want to'.

'And then they hop out and I think, can we have the cottage back and your HRHs? I do sympathise with them but there is a little bit of having your cake and eating it, which I don't enjoy'.

Their angry exchange began when Ms Boyle said criticism of Meghan in the media had been motivated by 'racism', adding: 'She's a black woman and she has been torn to pieces.'

But Fox hit back, saying: 'it's not racism' and continued: We're the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe… it's so easy to throw the charge of racism at everybody and it's really starting to get boring'.

However, Ms Boyle angered him and much of the audience by replying: 'What worries me about your comment is you are a white privileged male who has no experience in this.'

Fox responded: 'I can't help what I am, I was born like this, it's an immutable characteristic, so to call me a white privileged male is to be racist - you're being racist'.

SOURCE 






Status anxiety and the tyranny of opinion

By John Carroll, commenting from Australia

Proclaiming your own shallow virtue from the pulpit of social media has become the new religion.

As the year of identity politics, 2019, is now at an end, we should ask what has been going on.

The return of medieval heresy trials, draconian inquisition and pseudo-religious cults preaching apocalypse demands some inter­pretation. The new wars are over opinion. Belief has been separated from fact. In parallel, status has shifted from property and achievement to attitudes. Even a summer of catastrophic bushfire often has been co-opted by doomsday politics rather than met, as it should be, by sober gravity, sympathy and reflection on the nature and history of this harsh continent.

One obvious manifestation of insecure identity is status anxiety. Throughout the modern period, people have compensated for doubts about their worth by showing off their wealth, displayed in large houses, luxury cars, designer clothes and expensive holidays; living in prestigious suburbs; and sending their children to elite schools and universities.

They have indulged in what American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen dubbed “conspicuous consumption”.

Rise of the new snobs

The new snobbery, however, is not over bad taste, crude accents, cheap belongings and the wrong schools; it is over attitudes.

Some boast on Instagram that they personally carbon offset when flying #climatechange, and attract a stream of likes. Others tweet they support gay marriage #loveislove, and are deluged in hearts of approval. Thousands swarm against a Michael Leunig cartoon. This shift in the signals of status must be, in part, a feature of affluence — the markers of economic success matter less these days — combined with the fact the noise is coming almost exclusively from the ranks of the better off. In the upper middle class, comfort may be taken for granted.

The root of identity politics is revealed in its designation: in identity and its discontents. Mind, there is nothing new in anxiety about self. Seventeenth-century French moralist Francois de La Rochefoucauld argued that self-esteem was the strongest of human motivating forces. Vanity, egoism and fear of embarrassment and failure drive most human behaviour. In the pre-modern world, this was less universally true, for more than 90 per cent of the population had little time or energy left over from the daily grind of basic survival. Concern about identity was a leisure-time luxury they could ill afford.

The key to secure identity is an inner confidence underpinned by belief and belonging. Belief is primary. German sociologist Max Weber coined the term disenchantment to describe the central threat confronting the modern West. In a secular time that no longer believed in God, or indeed in any transcendental ordering principle, the risk was that the world would lose its magic and be come a dull and prosaic absurdity. Humans were left to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, and little else.

Samuel Beckett highlighted this condition in Waiting for Godot, arguably the most important play of the 20th century. For Beckett’s two tramps, life has become so pointless that they talk of suicide but can’t be bothered carrying it out. Meaning has become the modern problem.

In fact, faith in God has been replaced, in the shadows, by an alternative potential commanding attachment: that there are deep and enduring truths that underpin the human condition; and, further, that the good life depends on gaining some understanding of them and managing to live in harmony with them. These truths are elusive, and difficult to formulate and enshrine; Shakespeare’s entire work may be read as a wrestling to uncover their complex texture.

Things were much easier in the time of church religion, with priests, teaching orders, theology and doctrine, an absolute moral calculus, and a vast background of tradition, monumental buildings, music and art — all dedicated to proclaiming the faith.

As the West progressively moved into a post-Christian era, high culture and the universities became of vital social importance. Their guiding mission was to help ordinary people better understand their lives, and in particular bear the hardships and tragedies that beset them. They did this through telling stories about life in its manifold variety — in literature, art, music and more recently film — and then interpreting them. Across the past 1½ centuries, this mission, in the main, has been progressively abandoned. As a result, loss of faith has left a vacuum and the anti-belief, if pressed, that there is nothing.

Weariness rules

The need for faith, or some secular equivalent, seems to be universal. Without it, there is the uprootedness of Beckett’s demoralised tramps, who have no mental chart to guide them through the day, the month and the year.

Human identity without firm and distinct shape is condemned to leading a haphazard existence, motivated by profane pleasure and the pursuit of power. Pleasures diminish and power is capricious. A vacancy of belief drives some to seek tranquillisers and intoxicants; others to seek militant secular faiths. Those pseudo-religions, in turn, are given to a paranoid polarising of the world into good and evil. The psychology is familiar, from earlier times, when churches, out of their own insecurity, persecuted heretics, witches or those they deemed nonconformist.

Shaky medieval religion also triggered apocalyptic sects, which we see re-emerging today in an uncanny regression to our most superstitious past.

Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg provides a case study. Her demean­our and mode of declam­ation mimics that of a fundamentalist Christian preacher ranting about the end of the world. The intense eyes, the raging warnings of apocalypse and the incantatory chant of “How dare you!” pitched against the satanic adult world are reminiscent of some cult spawned in Waco, Texas.

There was a Children’s Crusade in the early Middle Ages: something like 20,000 children, led by two of their number, set out from France to free Jerusalem from unbelievers. The crusade foundered well before its destination, in starvation and disaffection.

There is also the other recent eruption of Extinction Rebellion, a movement of self-styled soldiers of virtue parading as if cast from the Book of Revelation. From London to Melbourne, they came hooded and garbed in bright crimson robes, faces painted white, with thin red lips, a cross between a medieval dance-of-death procession and spooky Hare Krishnas. These martyrs glue themselves to buildings and seek arrest — that is, look for self-vindicating persecution by evil authority.

Whatever the truth about ­climate change, the Extinction ­Rebellion apocalypse is based on a radical inflation of long-term global warming forecasts, in themselves as unreliable as economic forecasts, if not more so. Eminent Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith quipped that economic forecasting was invented to give astrology a good name.

Identity politics obeys the catchcry: I emote virtuously, there­fore I am

End of the world is nigh

Greta is not in herself of interest. What is alarming is that she has been taken seriously by the worldwide media, listened to devoutly by broad sections of the upper middle class and its cultural elites, given a platform at the UN and celebrated as Time person of the year.

Professional orders that are otherwise sober, serious, hardworking and methodical in their practical lives are turning, in their leisure, to quasi-religious venting, dark paranoid fantasy and wide-eyed righteous indignation.

This crusading opinion is being generated from within a tiny social bubble. Sociologist Peter Murphy has calculated from Twitter statistics that a mere 2 per cent of the American adult population deal in political opinion. The rest who use Twitter gossip about celebrities and lifestyle — but that too may come with a malevolent thrust, as experienced by Meghan Markle and the barrage of hate opinion she has attracted on social media, some of which has an overlapping political cast.

In last year’s federal election, climate change was proved to be a minority worry, playing a negligible role among mainstream voters, who remained uninterested.

The take-up of social media has meant angry opinion, which used to be limited to berating this or that political figure at the pub or the golf club, may be broadcast instantly and worldwide. It provides the mouthpiece for a global cacophony of hatred, malicious gossip, derision and persecution of those who are different, and coercive opinion containing the implicit threat: agree with me or else.

Foundation stones of the modern West crack: the liberal value of freedom of individual conscience, the Enlightenment values of reasoned argument and freedom of speech, and the civilised values of moderation and courtesy.

The ease of fingertip communication has aggravated the tendency for anyone, when hot under the collar, to speak impulsively and thoughtlessly, and to judge without mounting a clearly reasoned case. As people spend more of their leisure time on smartphones and less reading books, they develop habits in themselves ill-suited to measured reflection.

Addiction to social media brings with it a feverish restlessness of concentration and, it seems, a dependency on approval.

This is a trait that has taken centre stage, with posts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter receiving hearts and thumbs-up to indicate likes, even though the likes often come from strangers giving the post a few passing seconds of their time.

That recognition for a post comes in the form of a love heart is suggestive of an underlying depressive strain in the culture.

No depth or sense of self

At the pathological extreme, this kind of brittle self-esteem links with an inability to handle criticism, as with the 20-year old apprentice plumber whose work is corrected by his boss, sending him into a two-day sulk. Or univer­sities offering counselling for students whose sensitivities may have been damaged by opinions they disagree with. Or The Australian’s cartoonist Bill Leak being investigated by the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Identity politics obeys the catchcry: I emote virtuously, there­fore I am. The specific content is often unimportant, as illustrated by a low inclination to mar­shal arguments to back up opinion.

The in-vogue markers of identity today — sexual orientation, race, hostility to Western civilisation, and the environment — are more free-floating excuses for enthusiasm than real personal traits, for few of the crusaders are cross-gender, native peoples, Gandhi-like ascetics or Greenpeace sailors.

The enthusiasm is then expressed as high-voltage opinion on social media, during political demonstrations and in graffiti.

The logic of this type of depressive narcissism finds its main reward in the tick of approval. The thumbs-up or love heart is inflated in the imagination as recognition for the lonely self as a whole, the sum total of its identity, which is more than the specifics of its opinions. At the same time, self-esteem has become so fragile, the ego so lacking in confidence, that the mere whisper of a dissident view pricks the emoting bubble.

Even major institutions have taken to emoting virtuously. In part this has been to cover up the fact they have excluded while they have embraced. The mission statements of corporations, universities and sporting bodies proudly boast of inclusiveness, tolerance and diversity. But the more they do so, the more they have practised discrimination, intolerance and politically correct conformism.

Sigmund Freud termed this pathological syndrome negation, as in the aggressive smile — “to smile and smile and be a villain”. Negation was illustrated politically by the former East Germany, one of the nastiest dictatorships of the modern era, which called itself the German Democratic Republic.

It is not surprising, then, that belief has become separated from act. Others are judged by what they believe, not by what they do. Footballer Israel Folau and tennis great Margaret Court have been chosen as the local scapegoats.

Last year Rugby Australia, it seems, preferred to signal its own virtue than concern itself with the wellbeing of its sport, in on-field performance or its own balance sheet. Mimicking medieval relig­ious fanaticism, it persecuted its best player for his unmodish beliefs, likely picking on him because he was its best player — the more brilliant his rugby, the more evil his character.

Many professional footballers, if grilled on their attitudes, would not pass the heresy test. What separated Folau from the others is, first, rugby super-stardom; and, second, the unusual fact today that he strongly believes in something. His faith confronts and irritates. For the minority who are themselves fanatical believers, such as devotees of Extinction Rebellion and Greta, Folau is a true heretic worshipping the wrong god.

Likewise with Court. The fact she was the nation’s best female tennis player, and arguably the world’s best tennis player, makes her a beacon of sporting excellence. She has to be burnt at the stake because she lends authority to heresy, even though that heresy is the traditional view of marriage held by most of the Western world until very recently, and still held by a sizeable minority of Australians.

The Folau and Court cases tell us something more. The moral views at issue are not particularly shocking, for the public heat has gone out of both domains. Folau’s attitude to homosexuals is, to most minds, ludicrous, even laughable, as is his belief in Hell; and the same-sex marriage controversy is over, and decided, so who should care what Court thinks?

But crusading religion needs its devils, even if they are rather quaint and feeble devils. The sniff of evil provides blood energy.

Virtual shallowness

Communal belonging traditionally has proved the most successful way to compensate for the insecure identity that derives from the lack of much to believe in.

What sociologists call anomie results when community ties break down — anomie is the sense the world lacks cohesive norms and values. Strong community binds people together with shared purposes and common beliefs, providing a collective glue that helps its members feel at home in their world, with confidence about what they should do and how they should live their lives.

Today, the nuclear family provides the most common and successful example, with a lesser, supporting role played by schools, clubs and other associations.

The virtual community enabled by social media is not an entirely satisfactory substitute. It is, in general, less stable and enduring than the family, less tightly bound, and it mobilises a fickle, less cohesive legitimacy. More, it encourages aggregates of shared opinion rather than shared doing or face-to-face gathering together.

The disenchantment that follows from lack of belief in any fundamental truths anchoring the human condition has led to some malign compensations. It has unhinged the all-too-human search for security of individual identity.

Hell has gone, but not the belief in satanic forces and their incarnations. Christ the saviour has gone but not the belief in redemptive politics. The more atheist ranks have grown, the more we have seen, with religion, a Freudian return of the repressed. The best of secular values — freedom of conscience and opinion, underwritten by a liberal-democratic order — are suffering under an onslaught from the worst excesses of religion: the tyranny of right­eous opinion, fanatical preach­­ing and the persecution of heresy.

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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