Listeners and readers not robots
Pittsburgh horror and, pipe bombs reignite 'censorship vs free will' debate                                                     

Several decades ago, Roseanna Arquette was a Hollywood celebrity of sorts. And, not unlike so many faded show business notables, she recently sought new limelight by foolishly attacking the president for a terrible crime someone else had committed:

"Blood is on your hands Mr. trump  you have incited this Hatred and violence" [sic] she tweeted after the Pittsburgh horror. 

Her ugly instinct to exploit tragedy for grasping political advantage recalled the filthy advice notoriously dropped by Rahm Emmanuel: "Never let a crisis go to waste."

Deviant Hollywood's unpleasantness aside, the Pittsburgh tragedy and pipe bomb mailings have reignited a very old debate. Are listeners helpless in the clutch of speech? Is there no such thing as personal responsibility?

In the 1980s, the Parents Music Resource Center inspired actual senate hearings into the claimed possibility that uncensored rock lyrics might engender practical social harms. 

The nexus between politics and speech-hysteria was underscored by the PMRC's leadership: Tipper Gore, wife of then-Senator Al Gore, and Susan Baker, who was married to Reagan White House Chief of Staff James Baker. 

The censorious two were dubbed the "Washington Wives." Together, and with a little help from friends in high places, they succeeded in forcing unnecessary advisory stickers onto record albums.

Rap lyrics were also alleged by vote-counting bluenoses to be pernicious. 2 Live Crew was attacked by Florida attorney Jack Thompson, who sought to block sales of the group's CDs. Thompson was said to wear a Batman watch; he also crusaded against video games and the Howard Stern radio program. 

These illustrations were preceded by 1950s rock'n'roll critics and later Punk Rock's adversaries.

Of course received messages can impact attitudes. Ask advertisers. But no phrase can compel listeners to act in extreme ways to which they are not already disposed. Those arguing otherwise must pretend individual autonomy does not exist.

Rational persons are not robots. We do not automatically perform actions that speakers might urge.

Curious is the apparent belief by speech-squashers that they somehow possess the superpower necessary to allow them to obsess over 'outrageous' phrases, without suffering the negative influences they darkly intone would befall every single other listener.

Barring psychological dishevelment, we realize our places in the larger society; understand actions have consequences; seek to live harmoniously with others; and heed our consciences' counsels.

Assigning to speech responsibility for random listeners' ensuant misdoings is not only wrong, but dangerous; once accepted, that false notion can provide justification for censoring open expression.

And its ultimate potential is still darker. Eventually, emboldened by early-stage successes, those intent on stifling the free exchange of perspectives will doubtless push to silence all voices that challenge orthodoxy on matters of public interest.

Already, Big Tech is actively stifling conservatives like Alex Jones. Liberals once defended unpopular speech. And they would have fiercely battled the phenomenon of wealth determining citizens' political expression. 

But the old 'More speech, not less speech' maxim seems no longer fashionable wheresoever donkeys gather.

During a White House press conference, CNN provocateur Jim Acosta lamely tried to pin onto President Trump culpability for the pipe bombs. But Press Secretary Sarah Sanders would have no truck with Acosta's attempted dirty business, and took up her switch.

"I think it's irresponsible of a news organization, like yours, to blame [Trump for] a pipe bomb that was not sent by the president," she said, And "not just blame the president but blame members of his administration for those heinous acts. I think that's outrageous and irresponsible."

Hear, hear.

Democrats and the hate they love
Oprah, Stacey Abrams, NYT's Paul Krugman, Louis Farrakhan, and the reek of liberal phoniness

(Buzzfeed photo)

To some in politics and journalism, matters like honesty, accuracy, principle, and professional ethics are of less importance than whatever the advancement of ideology demands in a given moment.

On Tuesday morning, Buzzfeed reported that Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams planned to feature celebrity endorser Oprah Winfrey at upcoming rallies.

"There are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it, in that prejudice and racism, and they just have to die," Winfrey told a 2013 BBC interviewer. 

MSNBC clip: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD7QfC0Xjwk

Oprah intoned those words with the reptilian purposefulness of a serenely horrible lunatic. She did not specify white, but it is reasonable to read that ugly meaning into her words. It would strain credulity past the snapping point to suppose she also meant blacks, including herself.

It's safe to assume Abrams doesn't disclose to her rally attendees or TV ad viewers that her high-profile supporter Oprah believes Georgia would be a far better place were they buried.

Like her chosen advocate, Abrams also may want older Georgians dead. But until then, she sure as hell wants their votes.



*****


Winfrey's evil ideation and grisly phraseology were of a part with the contemporary philosophy that, while white racial prejudice was of course a noxious wrong well smashed away, black racism is somehow historically justified and positive.

It's now common for mainstream Democrats to sneer at the entire demographic group 'old white men.' To contemporary bigoted thinking, they are, inherently, a reliably assumed evil for which proof of wrong in individual cases is unnecessary.

Racism is a principle. A disgusting one. It assumes inherent inferiority or superiority according to immutable characteristics, and does not acknowledge individuals' merits. That is nonsensical, unscientific, and retrograde.

It is ugly in every practice. 

Shorn of specifics in this or that reprehensible instance, it must be denounced whenever it raises up its hideous head. It merits equally vigorous denunciation regardless of source or target. 

Liberals once claimed to believe that truth. Today, though, they seem intent on proving their actual disbelief in it whenever politically advantageous.

The moral imperative that demands consistency in condemning bigotry no matter its voice or application is one freely ignored by many politicians and Resistance urgers.

Why, look: many are as near as your cable TV dial or newsstand.



*****



In his 10/29 New York Times column, "Hate is on the ballot next week," Paul Krugman listed several truly despicable, racially prompted crimes against blacks that all good persons would condemn.

"Killing black people is an American tradition," Krugman wrote, as if such horrible actions didn't violate both U.S. laws and faith, and were instead somehow representative of an official national ideal. 

But logic is unimportant to a columnist intent on shoehorning America-hate into his writing.

A deceitful gambit popular of late is ignoring illustrations of liberal bigotry by shouting 'whataboutism.'  Krugman ignobly waved that stunt device.

The crafty canard sweeps aside the work of accounting for examples inconvenient to the Democrat cause, and of justifying the shouter's acceptance of ideological fellows' bigotry.

The underhanded trickery also saves Krugman and like-shouters from addressing, even cursorily, bigotry from their own quarter.

Krugman constructs his odd house on the untruth that no liberal attacks on conservatives exist, save for Democrats shouting at Trump Administration restaurant diners.

Krugman lied, of course.

Last July, Breitbart reported 632 violent acts inspired by hatred of the president had been totaled, nationwide. These included physical assault, theft, property destruction, and arson -- a good deal more serious than mere restaurant shouting. 


Other outlets, including the BBC, Fox, NBC, CNN, the Miami Herald, Investor's Daily, and the Kansas City Star have also spotlighted the many assaults on Trump supporters of which Krugman feigned unawareness.

And all TV viewers are familiar with footage of masked, anti-Trump mobs marauding through city streets, robotically chanting "Not my president!," and visiting violent destruction on everyone and everything they encounter.

Does Krugman believe violence against ideological adversaries is a legitimate tool, one not deserving of condemnation? As Tucker Carlson might ask: Is that really the type of country Krugman wants to live in?



*****


In denying the objective reality of exhaustively documented liberal hate, Krugman and others effectively give a pass to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan; the stench of hate has for decades surrounded Farrakhan like a foul cloud.

Farrakhan's hateful rhetoric has not for one moment dissuaded powerful Democrats from courting him. Barack Obama, Maxine Waters, Bill Clinton, Keith Ellison, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton are only some liberals who, like Paul Krugman, find bigotry to be no big deal when it is spewed from their camp. 

"The Jews talk about 'never again,'" Farrakhan said, in 2007. "You cannot say 'never again' to God because when he puts you in the oven, you're in one, indeed."

"White people deserve to die," he told rally attendees, a few years ago.

In 1984, Farrakhan said: "The Jews don't like Farrakhan so they call me Hitler. Well, that's a good name. Hitler was a very great man."

Also 1984: "Now, that nation called Israel, never has had any peace in forty years and she will never have any peace because there can never be any peace structured on injustice, thievery, lying, and deceit, and using the name of God to shield your dirty religion under His holy and righteous name."

1994: "Murder and lying comes easy to white people."

1997: "A decree of death has been passed on America. The judgement of God has been rendered, and she must be destroyed."

2000: "White people are potential humans - they haven't evolved yet."

2018: "I'm not anti-Semite. I'm anti-termite."

There are many other, similarly vile Farrakhan quotes. Krugman may soon pen a New York Times column fully explaining why he accepts the bigot Farrakhan and powerful Democrats' allegiance to him. 

Time will tell.

A unity, a division

Anti-Semitism and the widespread persecution of Jews represents one of the ugliest and darkest features of human history. The vile, hate-filled poison of Anti-Semitism must be condemned and confronted everywhere and anywhere it appears. We mourn for the unthinkable loss of life that took place today, and we pledge in their name to fight for a future of justice, safety, tolerance, morality, dignity, and love. We must all rise above the hate.

Those were the words of President Trump in a White House statement issued following the Pittsburgh horror. Only someone more committed to partisanship than good principle would dispute Trump. 

The passions conveyed by the president's words were laudatory. They bespoke the high character one expects from him.

But the president also advocated for the death penalty. I have for decades been a stalwart opponent of that. I can, in fact, quote Clarence Darrow's legendary trial summations on it. 

My opposition can be divided into three classes: personal, logical, and faithful.

1) To my way of thinking, killing (save for in self-defense) is immoral. Period. 

2) Human beings are fallible. Any process involving us cannot be guaranteed error free. No one can be reprieved from the cemetery, should a mistake be subsequently uncovered. For that reason, executions are not a logical option for protecting innocents. And that is a goal of the justice system. 

I have for decades held those sound views. And, alone, they are sufficient causes for being against capital punishment. But when I returned to the Catholic Church, last year, they were joined by another fine reason.

3) Persons convicted of capital offenses who've not yet accepted Divine authority are denied that precious opportunity by the executioner's lever. On the day of death, they may not be ready to convert. And standing between them and that future possibility is too awesome a responsibility for mere man.

Religious believers of sincere hearts may be of different opinions on executions. I am at too early a learning point to debate religious merits. But I do know wiser minds than mine have considered the faith arguments in depth. And my Catholic Church counts capital punishment opposition among its fine principles.

I part ways, then, with President Trump on this significant issue. But I was indeed glad to hear him denounce bigotry from the heart. His forceful condemnation of hate further distinguished an already noble presidency.

PRO-ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MEME DESTROYED    
And GQ writer Luke Darby waves pompons for lawbreaking            

This photo of Ellis Island-bound immigrants is preserved at the Library of Congress. The photo has recently been exploited as a meme by some who cheer the illegal immigrant caravan dead set on criminal invasion. 

Conflating earlier generations of legal immigrants with contemporary illegal ones slurs the former and is illogical on numerous levels. 

The immigration system in place when the historic photo was taken ensured an orderly process, one in which appropriate vetting was conducted and democratically enacted citizenship laws maintained. 

The illegal caravan, on the other hand, is by definition a criminal enterprise and represents a renunciation of Americans' sovereignty rights.

Presumably, if illegal immigrants succeeded in violating our laws to enter the country, they would then turn around and expect that same legal system to protect them and their private property. The hypocrisy meter just spun off its pin.

Contemporary foreign invaders who smashed through the border fence separating Mexico and Guatemala, and who've proclaimed to news cameras their intent to similarly defy American laws, are not lawful immigrants' equals. Neither legally nor morally. 

The car jacker, after all, is not the equal of the title holder.

Not acknowledging practical distinctions between legal and illegal immigration is today popular among two basic groups: those not much given to critical thinking and others who enthusiastically put philosophical bias ahead of reason.

Immigrants of earlier eras played according to the rules. They respected the laws of their new land. Medical examinations were performed prior to non-citizens being allowed into the United States. In that sensible way, the possibility that communicable diseases might enter the general population was forestalled. 

Today, diseases long ago defeated in the United States and Europe have reemerged. Whether their reappearance is due to lack of vetting, less reliance on vaccinations, or a combination of the two demands determination.

Promoters of unchecked ingress never explain how importing countless unskilled workers would benefit our job economy, rather than burden to the breaking point social programs intended to help legal American citizens. 

(And no, it is not wrong for countries to insist immigrants bring value to the bargain. In 2018, the United States does not require unskilled laborers in the number it once did. Pretending otherwise, and insisting yesterday's obsolete standards be maintained despite today's very different employment climate, is nonsensical.)

Underneath the opposition to citizenship laws is hostility toward the very concept of rules, standards, and legalities. But order is imperative. It guarantees that shared values be upheld and that individuals' God-given rights be safeguarded.

It was faith in that fair system, and not an illicit and opportunistic disposition, that distinguished Ellis Island's pilgrims.



----------

                                                                   Twitter avatar

An illustration of ill-considered hostility toward the rule of law was "Prank calling ICE is the kind of civil disobedience America needs," which recently ran in Gentleman's Quarterly. 

https://www.gq.com/story/prank-calling-ice

Writer Luke Darby encouraged the magazine's readers to interfere with that agency's enforcement of democratically enacted laws. Darby's is the same bratty, anti-order mindset that undergirds "Not my president" and is manifested in Antifa mobs physically attacking pedestrians, perpetrating arson, and otherwise destroying property and disrupting the general peace. 

The idiocy all but roars its obviousness: Once breaking laws is accepted as normal expressive practice, all future endeavors, including ones favored by Darby, would also be imperiled and subject to chaotic disruption. As would be his well-being and the integrity of any property he might own.

One feels certain Darby's GQ employers would not take kindly to his 'disobeying' established company policies.

Darby repeatedly sloughs off America as "undemocratic" without offering substantiation. A truly undemocratic nation does not hold free and open elections. This country does. A poll result's not being to Darby's preference does not constitute lack of democracy.

Nor do Darby and his ideological fellows have legitimate claim to "civil disobedience" justification for their calculated criminality. 

Unlike civil rights-era practitioners, they are in no way prohibited from productive participation in the electoral process through which citizens articulate values and shape the country's laws and general course.

Spoiled pretenders to principle, they merely surfboard atop the historic suffering of others. While sipping double lattes in the safety of Starbucks, perhaps.

They were not denied electoral voice, but were just unable to win the 2016 presidential election. That's not disenfranchisement. They're just lousy losers who offered an inferior candidate.

The land of counter-Trump          

Zoe Sharp is the author of popular thrillers. She was one of five writers whose anti-Trump pipe dreams recently ran in the peso-propped New York Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/books/review/trumps-next-chapter.html

"HOW IT ENDS" was the title given Sharp's horrible fantasy about an assassination of the current president of the United States. Her 
giggly monstrousness was just the newest example of a political bigotry in which the objective reality of President Trump's election is shoved aside for clumsy prancings in make-believe circumstances.

During my childhood, one of my favorite poems was "The Land of counterpane," by Robert Louis Stevenson. Its narrator recalled that as a child, he'd temporarily escape the reality of illness by constructing a fantasy world in which toy soldiers marched across his bed and did battle among bed clothes and a pillow hill.

Since President Trump's sound election, woozy Democrats have sought escape in similarly delusional fashions. Disposable television shows erect alternate realities, ones that manicured Hollywood hacks surely yearn for and cause toes to curl across the liberal landscape. 

Fathers are generally mocked as oafish, particularly conservative ones. Though successful, Tim Allen's "One Man Standing" was canceled by ABC. (It did turn up on Fox and has since racked up impressive ratings.)

For the ghastly offense of tweeting a single politically incorrect unpleasantry, Roseanne Barr was instantly persona non grata; nevermind that reliably leftish celebrities like Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and Sarah Silverman were allowed to continue prominent show business careers despite their still-available-online blackface 'comedy' routines. (ABC's Roseanne-less "The Connors" has done so poorly it may soon vanish, entirely.)

And as delicious as was the recent downfall of never-Trumper Megyn Kelly, it deserves observance that, as a sometimes conservative voice, she suffered a career punishment not accorded the Kimmels, Fallons, and Silvermans. 

To paraphrase the president: Hers were words, but theirs were actions.

In some programs, the ideal of the nuclear family is kicked to the curb, that space be made for all manner of oddball assemblages. And annoyingly tedious rap videos depict Trump's assassination and showcase imaginary degradation for America's first lady. 

And what is the ridiculous "Not my president" mantra if not a denial of the real world?

One's instinct is to dismiss these as the petulant carryings-on of people stupidly devoted to bad causes. The patheticness of their dribbly endeavors is made all the more manifest when one reflects that over 60 million hardworking, tax-paying, and decent-hearted American citizens bouyed Donald Trump to his due position on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The clamorous mob that devoted its every ugly ability to opposing America and Trump never accepted the profound shellacking it rightly suffered in 2016. If anything, its miserable agents have redoubled their stomach-turning efforts.

I've no doubt that at least some such instances are calculated simply for attention-getting purposes, much as squalling babies might hurl strained-pea dishes from high chairs. For that reason, only scant and negative attention need be paid them.


*****


CNN reporter Maeve Reston said that when in Iowa recently, senator and possible 2020 presidential candidate Kamala Harris received a "rock star reception."

Turns out Reston's description was accurate only if the rock star she was referencing was founding Foghat drummer Roger Earl. Reston raved that "electricity" could be felt. But even she conceded only "about 500" attendees had actually shown up to the Harris Des Moines event.

And 500 people couldn't generate enough wattage to illuminate the Iowa main street of your choice.

In Texas, that same night, President Trump's rally for Ted Cruz drew some 18,000 loyalists. Unlucky thousands not able to gain admittance into the packed arena stood outside. According to estimates, 100,000 requests for rally tickets had poured in.

CNN did not cover the far better-attended Trump/Cruz event as it was happening. Jeff Zucker's Fake News channel was too busy playing drooling groupie for a Democrat imaginary rock star.

CNNo
Fake News channel confuses already-fading beltway star with the "rock" variety 

CNN reporter Maeve Reston said that when in Iowa recently, senator and possible 2020 presidential candidate Kamala Harris received a "rock star reception."

Turns out Reston's description was accurate only if the rock star she was referencing was founding Foghat drummer Roger Earl. Reston raved that "electricity" could be felt. But even she conceded only "about 500" attendees had actually shown up to the Harris Des Moines event.

And 500 people couldn't generate enough wattage to illuminate the Iowa main street of your choice.

In Texas, that same night, President Trump's rally for Ted Cruz drew some 18,000 loyalists. Unlucky thousands not able to gain admittance into the packed arena stood outside. According to Trump, 100,000 requests for rally tickets had poured in.

CNN did not cover the far better-attended Trump/Cruz event as it was happening. Jeffrey Zucker's Fake News channel was too busy playing groupie for a Democrat imaginary rock star.

Believe in evidence

So glaringly manifest are the illogic and inherent unfairness of the faddish 'believe all survivors' cry today so popular in certain reprobate precincts that pointing them out seems a waste of time.

But there are persons, including in influential positions, who persist in urging that nonsense. So, a brief examination seems in order.

'Believe all survivors' posits without corroboration that each unproved claim is valid, its assertion unassailable. In courtrooms, that's rightly derided as assuming facts not in evidence. 

In civilized societies, those claiming to have been wronged are -- at least, ideally -- appropriately heeded and protected, and their allegations thoroughly investigated. A nation should defend its citizens and punish those who would harm them. 

Any offense against one is, by logical extension, an offense to the larger society. By meting out necessary punishments, we are expressing shared revilement and defending the whole.

But due process for accused citizens, including the presumption of innocence and insistence that guilt be established, is no less legitimate a component of our justice system. Do not the Constitutional rights of accused persons also deserve vigorous state safeguarding?

Two horrible incidents made possible by the 'believe all survivors' sentiment, as well as racial bigotry, merit recall. They illustrate the 
sickening, unAmerican injustice given succor by the uncritical credulity and disdain for Constitutional evidential standards some today insist upon.

In 1931 Alabama, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates claimed to have suffered sexual assaults. Based on absolutely nothing but their testimony, the 9 teenaged Scottsboro Boys were convicted. 

Of course, the Scottsboro Boys were years later shown to be wholly innocent. No such crime had occured; Price and Bates had lied.

And in 1955, Mississippi grocery store-clerk Carolyn Bryant falsely accused 14 year-old Emmett Till of whistling at her. As a result of only Bryant's deceitful claim, poor Till was tortured and lynched.

The repugnance of the crime committed against the innocent boy because Bryant's falsely asserted victimhood had been believed grieves the heart, yet today. Just as no woman should suffer sexual assault, no man should be jailed or lynched because of uncorroborated testimony. 

Yes, these are only two cases. But they illustrate a larger danger; their monstrous injustices were enabled by the flawed 'believe all survivors' notion. By learning from them the perils possible when all allegations are uncritically accepted, we can ensure similar travesties do not again occur.

We have rules of evidence and rights protections, and that is a good thing. Taking someone's freedom is serious; it should never be made easy or done without due regard.

General and rightful disgust at a type of offense does not establish that such occurred in each specific instance alleged. Every accused person enjoys Constitutional protections.

Robustly maintaining the rights of the accused is every bit as vital to justice system legitimacy as supporting claimed victims and pursuing redress for them.

The system works properly only when it works for all.

In advocacy of intellectual evolution

I once encountered the following online assertion (which I'm paraphrasing):

'My politics today are the same as when I was in junior high, in the 1960s.'

It was perhaps the saddest sentence I've ever read. The writer was bragging about intellectual and philosophical stasis, of bizarre pride in not having evolved.

(But it was dispiritingly reflective of the anti-intellectual, anti-Trump 'feelings' mob that prizes ill-considered emotions and primitive instincts over sophisticated reasoning.)

Changes are inevitable as years pass. Intellectual grasp develops. Base values are clarified and perhaps even re-evaluated. New information appears. Divergent perspectives of which one may not have been previously aware are paid heed, their counsel duly incorporated into ongoing consideration. Unfolding events can prompt particular analyses that may, in turn, reorder larger conclusions. 

And outright epiphanies can change fundamental thinking, turning avowed partisans into their opposites; examples include Christopher Hitchens, Michael Horowitz, Ariana Huffington, David Brock, and Tammy Bruce.

Growth is positive and to be cultivated; spending one's entire life in the same spot as when you first qualified for a driving license is cause for head-hanging embarrassment.

A healthy, open mind accepts that juvenile assumptions and prejudices may not have been thoroughly sound. It celebrates maturation. That is as it should be.

For my part, I've made tremendous strides. I've been a 1980s/90s Democrat Party loyalist who submitted county caucus platform planks and volunteered for campaigns; 2000 co-founder of the Iowa Green Party; independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader's 2004 Iowa coordinator; and current-day enthusiastic supporter of President Trump and the Make America Great Again movement.

I sometimes adopted different attitudes, but in other instances merely continued adhering to traditionally held, fundamental ones despite partisan permutations. I stuck with basic values and was unimpressed as liberals and the Left jettisoned them in repugnant will-nilly rush.

I realized external phenomena had changed. I rethought earlier assumptions and occasionally found them wanting. I came to better understand different approaches to reaching preferred destinations. And I made appropriate changes.

The Democrat Party's most visible and influential figures once championed free speech, equality, patriotism, a strong national defense, rigorously maintained citizenship standards and borders, due process, and the rights of the accused -- including to presumed innocence. They no longer do. 

I didn't move; they did.

The late Nat Hentoff was internationally recognized as a civil libertarian, First Amendment authority, and tireless participant in the momentous civil rights movement of the 1960s. Today's discourse would be of greater intellectual heft, and much more rewarding, were Hentoff yet a participant.

In one column toward the end of his illustrious writing career, he observed that he would in contemporary times be more inclined to support a Republican presidential candidate than a Democrat one. The former party, he wrote, was likely to honor and defend the Constitution and Bill of Rights to whose advocacy Hentoff had devoted his adult life in the streets, the classroom, and on the printed page.

The Democrats, he concluded, had become so destructively radical that they could be expected to rip up America's founding document and deny its important safeguards to citizens.

(One feels confident Hentoff would have been properly acidic in condemnation of the hysterical, guilty-until-proven-innocent senate Democrats-smearing of Brett Kavanaugh.)

It is to Hentoff's credit that he didn't cease intellectual and philosophical growth when his morning school bells rang. 

The evil Democrats do                          

(From AOL.com)

(From Rebrm.com)

As wonderfully refreshing as has been the Donald Trump presidency and Kavanaugh confirmation, this era has also unmasked the true and truly ghastly face of today's Democrat Party.

I might applaud that instructive product, were the poisonous visage not so ugly.

Indeed, such is the rapidity with which new examples of execrable violent political hatred from Democrats leap up, this essay will doubtless need updating as soon as it's posted.

Nevertheless, I'll persist.

- Following his vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, Colorado Republican Sen. Cory Gardner reported his wife was sent a threatening online message that included a beheading video. 

- Also following that vote, LifeNews.com reported that U.S. senators had received numerous threats of violence and assassination, some expressed in the vilest of language. Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee told Daily Wire "We've been through this in the past, but this is the worst it's been since I've been here...There's something underlying there that we're experiencing throughout the country right now..."

- So confident was Georgetown Professor Christine Fair that her hate would go without criticism she tweeted; "Look at that chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist's arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: We castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes."

(PJ Media reported Professor Fair administers an anti-men site on which she freely doxxes opponents' home addresses, phone numbers, family members' information, and other personal data.)

- Merely four days prior to this writing, a Google lead designer named Dave Hogue tweeted to Republicans "You are finished, GOP. You have polished the last nail in your coffin. FUCK. YOU. ALL. TO. HELL. I hope the last images burned into your slimy evil, treasonous retinas are millions of women laughing and clapping and celebrating as your souls descend into the flames." (Google, which is notorious for politically biased, viewpoint-discriminatory clampdowns on user expression, defended the vicious and horrible Hogue.)

Breitbart reported recently that the wife of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has taken to sleeping with a gun under her pillow, so many and of such grisly despicableness have been the hate messages hurled at her, of late. 

(From Afro.com)

- The Washington Times just reported a Minnesota teacher named Samantha Ness asked, on Twitter "So whose [sic] gonna take one for the team and kill Kavanaugh?" 

Democrats might well argue that the examples presented above were of speech and not action. They would regret speaking up. For here are sickening illustrations of the physical assaults some Democrats perpetrate. (Remember, they pat themselves on the back, assuring observers that they are the 'good people.')

Democrat leaders including Rep. Maxine Waters, DNC head Tom Perez, and Sen. Cory Booker urge supporters to confront Republicans, including when in private settings. And numerous administration officials and office-holders have been harrassed and driven from restaurants and movie theaters.


Other reported incidents include Resistance rioters destroying journalists' equipment; a progressive woman jabbing pregnant Infowars reporter Millie Weaver in her stomach; a Texas man snatching a MAGA hat off a teen's head and cursing at him; college Democrats stealing a student's MAGA hat; protesters pounding on the Supreme Court's doors; a shooter inspired by the SPLC's untrue smearing of a pro-life group to open fire on its office; and numerous incidents of property destruction and physical assaults perpetrated during Trump Inauguration Day rioting in Washington, DC. (During which Madonna infamously intoned "I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.")

(From PacificPundit.com)

During the presidential contest, a video of racist, liberal Chicago thugs physically torturing with a razor a kidnapped, gagged, and bound retarded man went viral. The thugs assailed the man for being white and presumably supportive of Trump. Around the same time, video surfaced of more Chicagoans cheering the gang beating of a suspected Trump supporter.

(From BoredonAndGomorrah.com)

In such feeble counter as they're able to mount, Democrats generally point to obscure and isolated oddballs unconnected to serious conservatives and who've been roundly denounced by same.

But Democrat hate is applauded by office-holders like Cory Booker and Dianne Feinstein; show business celebrities such as Cher, Tom Arnold, Joy Behar, and Rosie O'Donnell; legal/electoral figures like Michael Avenatti; sports nabobs like LeBron James and entire teams of anti-American anthem-kneelers; and talk-show baggy pants commentators like Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Bill Maher.

Remember, too, that future President Barack Obama launched his campaign in the apartment of his friend and patron Bill Ayres, an unrepentant 1960s political terrorist and bomber.

And Democrats revere as some noble 'people's folk hero' Assata Shakur nee Joanna Chesimard, who in 1973 murdered State Trooper Werner Foerster and later fled to the warmly welcoming embrace of communist Cuba.

(From Counterpunch.org)

(From LeftVoice.com)

During the Kavanaugh hearing, swarms of clownishly clad  dyspeptics filled the Washington street outside the senate building, as well as the gallery. As laughable as their infantile bellows and tantrums seemed to rational television viewers, though, they surely were no laughing matter to responsible legislators trying to perform adult constitutional duties.

(From Oanow.com)

Hardly a week passes without incidents of terrorist or illegal immigrant violence and murders, and sometimes-fatal attacks on law enforcement officers. Policies enabling these are routinely championed by Democrat elected officials like California Gov. Jerry Brown, Sen. Chuck Schumer, Sen. Cory Booker, Sen. Kamala Harris, New Jersey flavor-of-the-month Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and erstwhile vice president Joe Biden.

(From Vidostream)

(From RedState.com)

(From CatholicVote.org)

The enthusiasm with which political violence is perpetrated by liberals does not stop at national boundaries. "Man caught on camera kicking pro-life protester at anti-abortion rally," was an October UK Independent headline. The man, identified as Jordan Hunt of Justin Trudeau's Canada, had grinningly roundhouse-kicked a woman pro-lifer.

And of course, the Democrat Party supports the abortion industry, which has killed millions of babies since Roe v Wade's 1973 passage. 



*****


Illustrative quotes, not arranged chronologically:

"Already, you have members of your cabinet that are being booed out of restaurants...who have protesters taking up at their house...Let's make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, at a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere!"
- Sen. Maxine Waters

(It's indicative of Democrats' unreasonableness that they at once tell fellow Americans they are unwelcome in this country, while assuring illegal immigrants 'You're welcome here.')

"I have zero doubt that if Dick Cheney was not in power, people would not be dying needlessly, tomorrow...I'm just saying if he did die, other people, more people, would live. That's a fact."
- Bill Maher 

",,,I want to spit on them,,,knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads."
- Washington Post writer Courtland Milloy

"Michele [Bachmann], slit your wrist. Go ahead...or, do us all a better thing [sic] Move that knife up about two feet. Start at the collarbone."
- Montel Williams

"...And then there's Rumsfeld, who said of Iraq: 'We have our good days and our bad days.' We should put this SOB up against a wall and say 'This is one of our bad days' and pull the trigger."
- From a fundraising ad put out by the St. Petersburg Florida Democrat Club

"Get up in your neighbor's face...If they bring a knife, we bring a gun!"
- Barack Obama

"[G]o to the hill, today...get in the face of some congresspeople!"
- Sen. Cory Booker

"If I had my way, we'd see Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell strapped down to electric chairs and lit up like Christmas trees!"
- Stephen Crockett of Democratic Talk Radio

"May your children all die from debilitating, painful, and incurable diseases."
- Allan Brauer, communications secretary for Sacramento's Democrat Party, to Ted Cruz staffer Amanda Carpenter.

"...I personally think [Republicans] should be exterminated before they cause any more harm."
- Village Voice theater critic Michael Feingold

"I want a rhino to fuck speaker Ryan to death with its horn because it's FUNNY..."
- Filmmaker and longtime Democrat contributor Jos Whedon

"I wish they [Republicans] were all fucking dead!"
- Village Voice columnist Dan Savage

"When they go low, we hit harder!"
- Michael Avenatti

"Sarah Palin needs to have her hair shaved off to a buzzcut, get headfucked by a big, veiny, ashy, black dick and get locked in a cupboard!"
- Pop star and apparent rape enthusiast Azelia Banks

"Fuck that dude. I'll smack that fucker's comb-over right off his fucking scalp. Like, for real, if I met Donald Trump I'd punch him in his fucking face. And that's not a joke...Secret Service had better just fucking be on it. Don't let me be anywhere within a block."
- Rapper Everlast



*****

Following the Trump election, I published "That a Man Can Again Stand Up: American spirit vs sedition during the incipient Trump Revolution." In a chapter titled "Fascism comes to America under the name 'Resistance,' I observed the burgeoning trend among liberals for political violence:

And wherever the Resistance appeared, its most militant, black-clad, and masked members also were often in violent evidence. Calling themselves Antifa, for "anti-fascist," they enthusiastically wreaked fascistic terror -- physical assaults, arson, property destruction, and the 'shutting down' of any political or social speech with which they disagreed.

Mobs of Antifa street-terrorists in uniform ersatz-ninja costumery disrupted numerous pre- and post-election Trump and free-speech events, as well as ones featuring scheduled conservative speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos, Heather MacDonald, and Charles Murray. In Berkeley, in February, 2017, violent Antifa thugs were involved in three public brawls with ideological adversaries, including at one event celebrating free speech.

The third event to be attacked by destructive Antifa criminals was a "Patriots Day" rally. Footage depicts masses of violent, black-clad and masked Antifa thugs exploding enthusiastically in barbarous bedlam. 

Mass-assaults were perpetrated, fists flew, and blood ran. All to stifle patriotic speech. In America...

The rioting Resistance/Antifa movement is not the typical, knee-jerk, generational rebellion against whatever had preceded. It is a furious, anti-democratic lunacy whose college-age troops advance the interests of elder political players, just as youthful Nazi skinheads once served the cause of aging bigots like Tom Metzger.



*****


Democrat political violence is not new. History records it was Democrats who founded the cross-burning and lynching Ku Klux Klan. Today, they deceitfully claim otherwise. (Nor do they acknowledge the 1965 Civil Rights Act passed with greater Republican than Democrat congressional endorsement.)

(From StopRacism101.weebly.com)

(From LawReport.org)

Given the repulsiveness of the unAmerican, terrorist Klan, the inclination of current-day Democrats to be disingenuous about their odious parentage is understandable. But that calculated dishonesty is also unforgivable, especially given their deceitful attempts to attribute their own KKK-baby to Republicans.

Democrats have traditionally pushed violent political thugs from the Klan to the Weathermen to the Black Panthers to Black Lives Matter to Antifa.

(From GOPReload)

As rioting street-hordes swell, mainstream Democrat politicians, commentators, and advocacy groups not only refrain from criticism of left-wing political terrorism, but explicitly court the favor of its masked, destructive, assaultive, and screaming foot-soldiers. 

The immature, imbecilic, violent Frankenstein monster they're enabling, insofar as it urges against the very elections and institutions upon which office-holders depend, will one day turn its fire on present-day patrons in high positions. Foolish politicians who today indulge them may well come to rue their myopic opportunism.



*****


I don't for a moment believe the rancid illustrations presented are representative of all Democrats. I know they aren't, from personal experience. 

I came out of a Democrat (and later, Green Party) background. I have family and friends in the Democrat Party. And I know they would have no truck with violence or hateful rhetoric. They and I simply see things differently and have differing values. 

All of which is, of course, legitimate. 


Responsibility for rampant liberal law-breaking, though, lies not only with the relative few in headlines, but the many in the workaday world who ignore the ugly reality of bloody Democrat terrorism. 

This isn't about who wins a given election, or occupies an institution. This is about having elections and institutions. 

Chanting "Not my president," attempting to forestall democratic governmental operation, shutting down the free speech and organizational efforts of ideological opposition figures, immoral harassment campaigns targeting political adversaries, and seeking to disrupt the proper activities of judicial system representatives are not manifestations of legitimate citizen activism.

The sole ambition motivating Democrat terrorists, whether they wear Klan robes, Antifa masks, or politicians' sports jackets, and whether they sit on Washington thrones or prowl American streets in fanged packs, is the acquisition and permanent harboring of jackboot authority. 

"The Democrat Party has become the party of crime," President Trump has correctly noted.




**********

(From InsiderOnline.com)

Civil libertarian and historic civil rights champion Nat Hentoff, in a column he penned toward the end of his noble career, asserted that he would be inclined to endorse a Republican presidential candidate over a Democrat one. 

He felt Republicans were more inclined to support constitutional guarantees and protections of citizens' free speech and due process interests. The Democrat Party he had traditionally supported, Hentoff felt, had become so radical that it was dead-set on shredding the Constitution the columnist had dedicated the majority of his life to advocating in the streets, the classroom, the courts, numerous books, public debate, and on the newspaper page.

During the Kavanaugh hearings, as Democrats sent vile threats to officials and sought to gum up judicial operations, I wondered what the late voice for liberty might make of it all. His judgement of Democrats would probably be both on point and acidic.

Freedom of speech and the rights of the accused were once liberal touchstones. So were proper revilement of racial prejudice, support of democratic processes, and robust advocacy of intellectual freedom and ideological diversity.

In this 'shut it down' era, though, those fine matters have been jettisoned by a Democrat Party that, we now inarguably see, no longer values them. (Assuming that it ever sincerely did.)

Political speech is ground beneath Democrat boot heels on campuses and by the barons of Big Tech. Due process is no longer thought to be imperative to the realization of justice, but instead counterproductive to its mission.

In 1956, good people were rightly contemptuous of racists who slurred blacks and Jews. But in 2018, it is not at all unusual to hear Democrats sneering that "old white men" are, as a group whose sole unifying characteristics are immutable ones, undeserving of basic human respect and inherently evil.

(That last is not really much of a philosophical stretch for Democrats, recalling that party's principal role as KKK founder.)

Those whose devotion to matters of principle is solid are not swayed from adherance by political partisanship. They stick to their beliefs, uncaring as to the winds of the moment.

Others, as Hentoff came to realize, merely mouth sweet songs of equality and justice depending entirely on the transitory interests of The Party.