Cook County, Illinois State's Attorney Kim Foxx is Jussie Smollett-George Soros link
Soros' childhood Nazi collaboration recalled (60 Minutes video)

Wednesday, outlets told of Illinois State's Attorney Kim Foxx dropping all charges against Jussie Smollett. Smollett had claimed Trump supporters had committed a 'hate crime' against him. The Empire actor's unsupported allegation added to national hostility toward Trump backers. News media and entertainment figures already of that political prejudice rallied to his cause. 

Subsequently, his story fell apart. Friends confessed the 'crime' had been staged, that Smollett had paid them. Some speculated the TV actor had hoped visibility would gain him a pay raise from Empire producers.

To be fair, news readers couldn't know that Smollett's unsympathetic cohorts were credible. At a trial, both sides could produce such evidence and testimony they felt supported their argument. Because of Smollett's charge, considerable taxpayer monies and police man hours had been expended -- ones that should have been devoted to legitimate matters.

Though he was responsible for that waste, Smollett is not likely to repay Chicago citizens.

Police in that city were reportedly outraged by the State Attorney's dropping charges and her previously alleged interference into the investigation. TMZ claimed Foxx's interference was at the behest of Tina Tchen, a former Michelle Obama aide. According to TMZ, Foxx maintained contact with the Smollett contingent, apprising them of developments.

Smollett alone had made the assertion. Not only was it never substantiated, but accounts ultimately offered by his confederates beclouded the entire matter. There were no witnesses, nor videotape documentation. 'Presumption of innocence' applies to suspects, not those leveling charges.

Past reports in Breitbart, Politico, and elsewhere have noted infamous financier George Soros helped bankroll the 2016 Kim Foxx campaign.

Speaking of Soros..

Never forget this about George Soros

It may, in lofty economic reaches not glimpsed by this writer, be thought that questions of morality are irrelevant trifles to be ignored, and that macro matters of humanity are bloodless equations to be resolved however best advances global manipulators' vested concerns. 

George Soros is a billionaire patron of hideous interests like Planned Parenthood, abolition of national borders and sovereignty, and racial discord as urged by Black Lives Matter. 

A desiccated, death's-head Mr. Toad, Soros is said by critics to position the world's peoples and international affairs like a reptilian-blooded chess player, his amoral efforts calculated in a mostly obscured shadow land safeguarded by his kept mercenary army.

A December 20, 1998 60 Minutes interview revealed the particularly grisly, character-shaping WWII Nazi death camp-collaboration George Soros had as a 14 year-old perpetrated.

60 Minutes' Steve Kroft summarized that period:

When the Nazis occupied Budapest in 1944, George Soros' father was a successful lawyer. He lived on an island in the Danube, and liked to commute to work in a rowboat. But, knowing there were problems ahead for the Jews, he decided to split his family up. He bought them forged papers and he bribed a government official to take 14 year-old George Soros in and swear that he was his Christian godson. But survival carried a heavy price tag. While hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being shipped off to the death camps, George Soros accompanied his phony godfather on his appointed rounds, confiscating property from the Jews.

A transcript records this Kroft / Soros exchange:

KROFT: "You're a Hungarian Jew who escaped the Holocaust by posing as a Christian."

SOROS: "Mm hmm."

KROFT: "And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps."

SOROS: "Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that's when my character was made."

KROFT: "In what way?"

SOROS: "That one should think ahead. One should understand and anticipate events and when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a very personal experience of evil."

KROFT: "My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted grandson. Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews."

SOROS: "Yes. That's right. Yes."

KROFT: "I mean, that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?"

SOROS: "No. Not at all, not at all. Maybe as a child, you don't see the connection. But it was -- created no problem, at all."

KROFT: "No feeling of guilt?"

SOROS: "No."

KROFT: "For example: 'I'm Jewish, and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there. None of that?"

SOROS: "Well, of course I could be on the other side, or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that was -- well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in markets. That if I weren't there -- of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would be taking it away, anyhow. And it was the -- whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator. The property was being taken away. So, I had no role in taking away that property. So, I had no sense of guilt."

That if I weren't there...somebody else would be taking it away, anyhow.

The rationale behind conscientious objection is not that spaces would left vacant by objectors' refusal to participate. But that objectors themselves would not help enable the process, and would sooner risk punishment than betray their own consciences.

Following WWII's end, Nazi scientists like Wernher Von Braun were smuggled into the US via Operation Paperclip, that American rocketry efforts might benefit. Single-minded mission-drive similarly took precedent over moral issues.

By accepting Soros' unashamed Nazi collaboration, that their parochial ambitions enjoy sustenance, modern-day American leftists have entered a compact with evil. Their subsequent endeavors are rotted by the association.

It is not clear whether George Soros has convinced himself of the delusion that he is not accountable for his admitted collaboration with the Nazis, or only claims as much for the benefit of contemporary interlocutors. If the former, he is himself a victim, in a peculiar and pathetic way.

But if the latter is accurate, it indicates the cold dispassion and self-obsessiveness of a monster.

Addendum:

Nazi collaboration, meet Fake News: A liberally corrupt 2016 Snopes.com entry (updated in 2018), classed the collaboration claim as "False," despite Soros' 60 Minutes admission. (So arrogant was Snopes.com's Soros apologist that he included a link to that interview, despite its contradiction of his scurrilous revision.) 

Snopes.com's essayist pressed the illogic that being an accessory to an action, and in full knowledge of its purpose, is somehow unrelated to it: "Yet the simple truth is that George Soros neither said nor did anything resembling what he has been accused of."

Snopes absolved Soros of shared moral culpability because he did not himself rob the bank, but 'merely' drove the getaway car. 


This essay originally appeared in my 2018 book, Ideas Afoot (Bromley Street Press)

Join the evolution    

It's essential to acknowledge the distinction between classical liberals, who revered Constitutional principles, and today's lack-wittedly obstreperous who howl for America's downfall with no conception of how to engineer a viable alternative.

Many are the aging Democrat faithful, enamored of liberal icons like FDR and JFK, for whom today's Democrat party has neither respect nor use, save for as robotic, electoral booth lever-pullers. 

Veteran Democrats' loyalty owes to counterproductive sentimentality. "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory," as Johnny Thunders famously sang.

In 2019, the Democrat Party has mutated into a bizarre assemblage of oddball, segregated identity groups and ill-considered propositions Martin Luther King wouldn't recognize.

King pressed for the American government to acknowledge all citizens' rights. He never urged that non-citizens be elevated to commensurate status.

Many in my family are Democrats. I was, too. For decades, I fought on the progressive side, even eventually leaving the Democrats to become an Independent. (Which I still am.)

I later helped found the Iowa Green Party and served as paid 2004 Iowa Coordinator for independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader. 

(Legendary consumer rights advocate Nader is a strenuous opponent of undemocratic governmental machinations; frivolous defense and other budget allocations; unwarranted militarism; and America-based corporations' lack of patriotic loyalty. That's evidenced by their price manipulations and relocating U.S. jobs to lower-paying foreign markets. Corporations' "race to the bottom" wreaks domestic human and economic damages of various descriptions. Ralph Nader is a valuable figure with much to teach.)

The journey that brought me to support President Trump was informed by new information, honest contemplation, and openness to contrary perspectives. Concepts previously unexplored were given respectful consideration.

I'd always assumed most Americans revered Constitutional principles and national identity, and that we proceeded in different ideological directions from that shared foundation. 

Adults in recent decades might not have articulated patriotism as explicitly as had earlier generations, but I thought it was such a given that advocating in its interest was unnecessary. 

(I recall, as a 1960s boy, standing beside my Iowa Catholic elementary school desk, hand over heart, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with 20-some classmates. Back then, parental insistence that children be allowed to opt out of patriotic promises was unheard of.)

I later realized I'd been overly optimistic in my assessment. To whatever degree the assumption of common national faith might once have been true, it was increasingly apparent that it no longer was.

I realized my ever-extant American pride merited vocalization and electoral expression, especially when the nation itself was under attack on multiple fronts.

Demands that historical monuments be demolished, popular commonality no longer honored, citizen Constitutional speech and self-defense protections got rid of, and national sovereignty and citizenship laws erased, awakened in me abiding values that had always lain under the surface.

Progressives today have no sympathy for the intellectual and expressive freedoms liberals once defended and that I'd long held sacred. They promote speech-codes, library censorship, trigger warnings, booksellers' viewpoint discrimination, public speaker interference, political flyer destruction, Big Tech and financial services denying access based on ideology, and 'hate speech' prohibitions that can lead to imprisonment for saying something the government doesn't like.

President Trump's signing just days ago of the campus free-speech executive order was the most robust White House declaration of citizen speech support in memory. And that important action was more in keeping with my long-held view that government should protect citizen expression rights than is contemporary Democrats' embrace of governmental powers silencing citizens.

Nor do Democrats still seem to believe in defendants' rights or historical accuracy. I do and always will.

I've long opposed the death penalty. (On that point, I am in profound disagreement with the president.) But then, I haven't heard a Democrat presidential candidate speak against it since CNN debate moderator Bernard Shaw savaged Dukakis, in 1988.

And President Trump's message of American citizen oneness is certainly more in keeping with King's noble mission than modern-day Democrats' identity group segregation. We don't have a caste system, in which people have, by accident of birth, different rights. That terrible notion is roaringly antithetical to America's ideal of citizen equality.

Think about what 'progressive' means. Constant movement. With each victory, the goalposts are pushed further. Common sense notions that had over time shown themselves to be fair, sensible, and successful are shoved aside. And new 'injustices' are loudly bannered as requiring immediate redress. Progressives never say 'We'll stop here. This is far enough.'

Look at the political world. Is it still what it once was? Are allegiances proper decades ago still representative of your fundamental values, or might sentimentality be holding you back from voting as you now truly are?

Change is healthy. It can result from decades of serious consideration and open inquiry. Epiphanies also can be valid. They reflect realization of fundamental conflict between altered externals and previously unconsidered internals.

Don't fear evolution. Welcome it. It proves you're alive, and have a mind and a heart.

(This essay was adapted from my forthcoming book: "...And It's Good Enough For Me.")

Viewers beware: FNC hires 'regretful' Donna Brazile  

So, the Fox News Channel has hired former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile to offer commentary. 

I can't imagine a news channel retaining infamous dissembler Roger Stone as a commentator. The foppish career trickster made a name for himself by muddying electoral campaign waters with vulgar stuntery. 

No channel that respected its audience would foist the velveteen mountebank on it. And though Brazile lacks Stone's lengthy history of chicanery, I'm prompted to put her in his category. 

Here's why: 

Prior to a 2016 CNN presidential debate, Brazile gave debate questions to Hillary Clinton. 

Brazile initially denied she had helped Clinton cheat. She even claimed victimhood, declaring to then-FNC host Megyn Kelly: "As a Christian woman, I know about persecution." 

Somehow, though, Brazile was ignorant of the Ninth Commandment's admonition against lying. And of Proverbs 6: 16-19, which instruct that a "lying tongue" is something the Lord "strongly dislikes."

Brazile was dropped by CNN, which claimed to be "completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor."

Eventually, she did admit guilt. 

"My job was to make all our Democrat candidates look good and I worked closely with both campaigns to make that happen. But sending those [debate question-containing] emails was a mistake I'll forever regret." Brazile wrote in a 2017 Time essay.

And now, Fox News execs are giving her a second chance. As per old jailhouse movies, they may also have given her a new suit and a $10 bill.

In the biblical spirit, of course, we should be forgiving of Brazile's transgression. But remaining wary nonetheless is just common sensical. 

"There's an audience on Fox News that doesn't hear enough from Democrats. We have to engage that audience and show Americans of every stripe what we stand for rather than retreat into our 'safe spaces' where we simply agree with each other," Brazile wrote in a statement that addressed her FNC hiring. 

I appreciate exposure to perspectives from across the spectrum. I seek them out, daily. Sound ideas can come from anywhere. And listening to a variety of voices enriches our own knowledge and understanding.

I wouldn't ever want to hear just one side. I prefer to hear all, and make my own judgement. You never really know what's over the hill until you've looked. 

But I believe FNC's employ of Brazile can be thought if a part with the channel's apparent inclination to placate PC liberals. While evident in previous times, that disturbing phenomenon has perhaps increased following the DNC's announcement it would not partner with the channel to present a primary debate.

Judge Jeanine Pirro was recently sanctioned by FNC for criticism of Rep. Ilhan Omar, At one point in on-air commentary, Pirro had wondered whether Omar's hijab might indicate Sharia sympathy.

Pirro was tweet-smeared by FNC behind-the-camera staffer Hufsa Kamal, an associate producer of Special Report with Bret Baier. 

"@JudgeJeanine can you stop spreading this false narrative that somehow Muslims hate America or women who wear a hijab aren't American enough? You have Muslims working at the same network you do, including myself. K thx."

That Pirro had said exactly none of the things alleged by Kamal in her ugly tweet didn't deter the fake news-mongerer.

The general tone of much Fox News programming is, at best, suspicious of President Trump and unsympathetic to regular Americans' interests. Each weekend, Arthel Neville and Leland Vittert shamelessly parade anti-Trump sensibilities.

"Were @FoxNews weekend anchors, @ArthelNeville and @LelandVittert, trained at CNN prior to their ratings collapse? In any event, that's where they should be working, along with their lowest-rated anchor, Shepard Smith," tweeted President Trump, Sunday.

That same day, another example leapt up: Chris Wallace tried to get away with deceptively editing a statement from the New Zealand shooter, that President Trump be portrayed unflatteringly. Fortunately, White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney immediately foiled Wallace's underhanded bid.

Other FNC personalities inclined against America's president include Judge Andrew Napolitano, the afore-mentioned Shepard Smith, and Neil Cavuto. 

A good way to establish which Fox personalities liberal speech-stiflers consider politically oppositional is to review which ones they urge be boycotted. Hannity, Calson, Pirro -- yes. Wallace, Neville and Vittert, Napolitano, Smith, Cavuto  -- no. 

Nor does action against Brazille seem likely. FNC execs appear by their own actions to be more concerned with the opinions of the channel's detractors than the viewers that made them successful. 

How long until the (not very) conservative Fox News Channel features an openly transsexual host? 

Liberty must never be traded for security 
  
    

Following the tragedy in New Zealand, many not only decried bigotry and related violence, but attacked free expression. As if debate in the public square necessarily produces atrocities.

On 3/15, The Hill ran "White supremacist terror can no longer be ignored." It was authored by Abbas Barzegar, national director of research and advocacy at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

He is not alone in pressing for the powerful to silence speech. Many political opportunists seize upon terrible events for partisan advantage. ("You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," as Rahm Emanuel notoriously put it.)

In early paragraphs, Barzegar seemed reasonable:

"Whether it's ISIS, Nazi fascism, or any other ideology of racial and religious supremacy, hate has the same DNA."

Barzegar rightly observed that wherever hate exploded into horrible atrocity, and despite bileful perpetrators representing different causes, illogical group-hostility was a common faith. 

He also stressed that, like the white supremacists in Andrew McDonald's Turner Diaries novel, mass-murderers who targeted entire racial, national, or religious communities harbored "Day of the Rope" genocidal fantasies. 

After so lulling readers, though, Barzegar posited suppression of citizen political speech as imperative societal self-defense tool.

"While the world categorically rejects this type of ideology and violence, as global citizens we must do all that we can to take back control of our public spaces," Barzegar counseled. "Whether in media, popular culture, or politics, we need to be vigilant and not allow the poisonous rhetoric of ethno-nationalist extremism to invade our public square."

The CAIR spokesman proposed that a speech clampdown emanate from the people. But only the state has the needed institutional power to effect general prohibitions. The rights of the minority are not vulnerable to majority whim. 

The subtext of Barzegar's essay was the implied assertion that security can be got by surrendering individual liberty.

A clampdown on political expression would stifle not only miscreants who urge violence and supremacy, but also major-party politicians and backers who articulate conventional views to which some object. 

Issue organizations and individual activists would also have much to fear, should perspective discrimination become the guide.

For example, it once was accepted that "racism" connoted the foul belief that a race can be innately superior or inferior. 

Today, though, some argue it's racist to espouse national sovereignty or wear MAGA hats. So it's important to consider that goalposts may be moved from places where before they were reasonably set. And that what one man embraces as healthy patriotism can be (wrongly) villified as hate speech by another.

The only way this can be satisfactorily addressed, as has traditionally been the case, is to maintain a values-free speech environment. And let debate unfold.

As true today as when argued in earlier years, the solution to bad speech is good speech. More intellectual exchange, not less. 

When inferior ideas are not publicly tested against better ones, and are instead driven underground, as CAIR's Barzegar and others urge in tragic moments, they can seem plausible to the unwary. 

But in the glare of open attention, and when subjected to vigorous challenge, they deservedly wither. And that's truly in the public interest.

Ugly ideas, glibly dispensed
Andrew Marantz of the New Yorker attacks Tucker Carlson. Mad academics advocate terribleness                                  

"Can Tucker Carlson be shamed?," by New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz, was a fairly standard smear effort.

In the opening paragraph, Marantz quoted from a Carlson segment in which the host warned of political cultists who "seek power, and they plan to win it, whatever it takes. If that includes getting you fired, or silencing you, or threatening your family at home, or throwing you in prison, OK."

Marantz observed "At no point was he interrupted or arrested by jackbooted thugs," as though the scribe had with that flippant comment discredited Carlson's message.

But the New Yorker author didn't acknowledge that Carlson was cautioning a nationwide audience, at least some of whom do experience related problems. 

Stories have for a couple of years told of Trump supporters being refused commercial service in public accommodations, and of Big Tech overlords banning voices like Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, and Dennis Prager -- not to mention mega-banks and credit services cutting off access from conservative political figures.

(A fresh illustration is ticket-seller Eventbrite's denying access to Brigitte Gabriel's ACT for America. Breitbart noted: "The ban arrives just one week after a former Nancy Pelosi intern wrote a hit piece on the organization, relying on information provided by the discredited SPLC.")

From across America have come hundreds of stories of Trump backers suffering brutal attacks and property destruction inspired by political bigotry. Carlson's own home recently came under assault by Antifa terrorists. 

Marantz made no mention of any of those realities. The writer claimed Carlson has espoused views that "sound uncannily similar to white-nationalist propaganda." 

Of course, Marantz didn't provide any supportive quotes, let alone explain weasel-phrase "uncannily similar," or show just how 
Carlson's rhetoric might fit the dire portrait daubed. He merely asserted damning association. (Didn't liberals used to condemn McCarthyism?)

Marantz cites the left-wing Media Matters, which has publicized dusty audio not to Carlson's credit (as jokes beyond their moments sometimes aren't).

Marantz quoted Media Matters head/Carlson attacker Angelo Carusone approvingly, but the New Yorker wordsmith didn't note Carusone's past blog mocking of "Japs," "trannies," and "Jewry."

Had those phrases been uttered by a conservative, online petitions would immediately pop up. Events would be cancelled. Jobs would be lost. Callow Antifa hordes, weapons at the ready, would likely mass on the offender's doorstep.

But when said by Media Matters' dodgy ringleader Carusone, the Andrew Marantzes find other things with which to concern themselves. The point isn't to augment the left's language police with conservative fellows, but rather, that those who blog in glass houses should leave stones where they lie.

Marantz has questioned the concept of free speech before in the New Yorker's pages, and lent spotlight to other terrible notions, too.

"Public universities have no choice but to welcome far-right speakers seeking self-promotion. Should the First Amendment be reinterpreted for the digital age?" was the subheading of a 2018 New Yorker Marantz article.

He decried universities that expend resources to safeguard "pugnacious right-wing speakers" like David Horowitz, Heather Mac Donald, and Charles and Donald Murray. Nowhere did he blame protesters for engendering costly precautions.

He attacked Horowitz et al with the same McCarthyism "guilt by association" tactic he would subsequently wield against Carlson, citing Richard Spencer in the same breath as them. 

"Such speakers often portray themselves as soldiers for free speech," Marantz wrote. "But more often they use the First Amendment as a convenient shield."

Seeking to orate without prohibition, he communicates, is the tell-tale skull-and-crossbones stain of dastards.

Marantz quotes Berkeley Law Professor john a. powell: "[I[t's not that I don't understand or care deeply about free speech. But what would it look like if we cared just as deeply about equality? What if we weighed the two as conflicting values, instead of this false formalism where the right to speech is recognized but the harm caused by that speech is not?"

To my mind, liberty of thought and speech is the rock atop which all other rights sit. If arguments in favor of freedom cannot be articulated, no other right can be asserted. When the right to speak one's thoughts is weakened, every single other guarantee is imperiled.

powell and others posit that damages which supposedly accrue from hearing 'unpleasant' expression are of equal weight as physical harms. They argue that some random listener's emotional disquiet is sound reason for government slapping shut citizens' mouths.

Later in the piece, powell wonders whether traditional notions of what constitutes personal injury are sufficient "Given what we now know about stereotype threat and trauma and P.T.S.D..."

Words, though, don't lend themselves to definite causation. Nor do ideas produce certain negatives.

One defensible restriction on speech is the ban on untruths and substantive omissions from food labeling. There is a legitimate public interest in complete information, as physical damages can be reasonably thought potential from misleading data.

That such damages might vary by degrees between individuals is inconsequential. General injury is safely assumed.

But there can be no similarly reasonable assumption that emotional or psychological damage necessarily results from words. And, should a listener desire to avoid encountering certain ideas, they are free to do so. They can not attend a given event, turn the channel, or not purchase a book.

But they have neither the legal nor moral right to edit the world in which we all live, to keep others from speaking or prevent them from hearing desired speakers. 

(Mario Savio, of 1960s UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement fame, was cited by Milo Yiannoupolos as as a philosophical forebear. Marantz related that Savio's son, Daniel, told the Guardian that Milo's laying claim to Mario's tradition was "a sick joke." There can be no better illustration of contemporary liberals' hostility toward the fact of free speech's universal benefit than that ill-considered shriek.)

Another Berkeley academic Marantz quoted was Adam Jadhov ("I consider myself an activist, not just an academic.").  

Jadhov warned of a "shadowy political element weaponizing a narrow interpretation of the First Amendment." He cast oppositional political speakers as evildoers exploiting protections for nefarious purposes, not fellow citizens legitimately exercising Constitutional rights.

Jadhov aligned himself with Antifa, but said he's not sympathetic to violent elements. That claim is dubious. "I do, however, think it's important to stand up against hypernationalism and Fascism in all of its forms. That might entail breaking unjust laws, but that's how progress has always been made."

No, that's untrue. Individuals are not authorized to determine for the entire society what is "unjust." That way lies anarchy, not the order and ultimate fairness produced by a Constitutional nation with democratic government.

Fantastically romanticized 'rebels,' whose chronicles litter collegiate library shelves and whose images adorn Hot Topic t-shirts, should not be credited with positive changes. Ours is a country of laws, not of men. Ballots, not bullets. And it is through the democratic process that the people's will is voiced, justice advanced, and legitimate evolution realized.

Inspiration certainly can and has risen to offices of authority from popular groundswells. But it takes systemic power to effect practical advancement on a national level. No matter how emotionally urgent, sentiment without practical ability accomplishes nothing of substantive, lasting value. Nothing that makes our lives richer, and our country more free or fair.

Would only that forces presently villifying Tucker Carlson -- whether they boast New Yorker bylines, Ivory Tower titles, electoral clout, or activist bombast -- apply their abilities to strengthening existing liberty.

That's much more respectable than exhuming long-passed radio ribaldry.

AZ News bigot busted

According to his Facebook page, Cameron Ridle is "the Breaking News Reporter for Good Morning America on KTVK-TV in Phoenix, Arizona." 

Ridle also reports for 3TV's Good Morning Arizona and CBS 5 This Morning, according to AZFamily.

Ridle recently covered a pro-President Trump protest held outside Perry High School in Gilbert, AZ. That school's principal and staff had allegedly punished a student for wearing MAGA attire on an official "Spirit Day." 

The principal had claimed fear about "student safety" as justifying violation of a Trump-supporting student's Constitutional right to free expression.

Breitbart noted Ridle was picked up on an AZFamily recording (of which he was apparently unaware) talking with another man as they neared the Perry High School protest. 

"Let's say I walk right down the sidewalk next to them," Ridle speculated. "Maybe they'll call me a nigger!"

"You'll come pretty close," laughed the other man.

(I address my repetition of that noxious slur in the extended note that follows this piece.)

In a Youtube video critical of Ridle, the narrator observes "He then laughs and continues to refer to the Trump supporters using racist language." 

AZFamily initially posted the incriminating clip on its Facebook page, though Breitbart reported it was later deleted.

By his broad-brush imputation of racist inclinations to Trump backers of which he presumably had no direct knowledge, Ridle gave utterance to his own ugly prejudice. And that has made publicly evident his potentially corruptive bias.

Ridle had previously voiced insulting, unfair views of President Trump in full public display.

In a Feb. 7 Facebook post that promoted CBS 5 AZ, GMAZ, and AZFamily coverage of Michael Cohen's House testimony, Ridle wrote "He is expected to call @realDonaldTrump a 'racist,' 'con man,' and a 'cheat.'" 

That Ridle chose to banner those particular false allegations illustrated his unseemly sensibility.

In comments to that post, left after Ridle expressed his own contemptible racial bigotry prior to covering the Perry High School protest, one user remarked of the reporter "We found out who the racist punk is didn't we...resign cameron." Another user replied "You're calling others a racist? That's rich."

Important to remember is that Cameron Ridle and other reporters have as much right to private opinions as any other citizen. And they can express them in personal conversations, which is what Ridle did. (Of course, the unfounded slur against supporters of America's president was flung by him while in his professional capacity.)

It's only when personal prejudices are allowed to impact reporting and news judgement that there's a problem.

Ridle's future reporting should be monitored by local viewers. Do signs of his political and racial bigotry turn up in reportage? 

No matter what Ridle might say in future days and regarding other stories, viewers now 'woke' to his pernicious prejudices will not be able to see and hear him without knowing of the ugliness toward the patriotic that seethes in his heart.

Trump carried Arizona in 2016. He was awarded the state's 11 electoral votes. Wikipedia notes that 74.17% of Arizona's voters participated, and that Trump received 49.03% of ballots. Hillary Clinton got just 45.46%.

Which means Cameron Ridle is contemptuous of a hell of a lot of Arizonans.


Note: Typing the word "nigger" wasn't easy for me. Knowledge of its historic use as a weapon and contemporary employ toward identical end long ago put that word out of my vocabulary.

Too, I'm married to a black woman and am particularly sensitive for that reason. 

But she isn't bothered when she hears that slur. "Because it doesn't apply to me," she says, dismissively. Good for her!

That word, and the wickedness it implies, deserve sound obloquy.

I choose not to use it in personal conversation. To do otherwise would make me feel linked to past injustices. But that's the pivotal point: I choose what words I use, for reasons of my own calculation. 

I reject as inimical to personal liberty the concepts of speech codes and regulations. Let each man be his own editor. Observers can listen or leave, as they choose.

It was used here in a quote, by the subject of the piece. And one hears it frequently in select rap songs and social exchanges.

So, as vehemently as I detest that slur, I am just as strong in the belief that a word freely uttered by some must never be thought inaccessible for others. In America, men don't have greater or lesser or somehow different rights depending on which 'community' they represent. Here, we have no caste system.

I support equality of men, including speech -- whether it be pleasant or putrid.

The limited legislation lie                            

In the Sunday, March 10 Des Moines Register, columnist Kathie Obradovich wrote "There's no such thing as a limited death penalty. Politicians like to use that phrase because they think it makes state-sanctioned death more politically palatable."

Obradovich was right. Once legislators get a foothold, they (or successors) seek to broaden what has been established.

I've written of my own lifelong opposition to capital punishment numerous times, most recently, only yesterday (see below).

Another example of the exact phenomenon of which Obradovich warned is illustrated by recollection of Roe v Wade-era abortion proponents. 

Like current Iowa execution advocates, they sought public accommodation for 'limited' procedures by highlighting horrific instances of rape. They also wove tales of medical misadventures in proverbial back alleys.

Even in the 1990s, Bill Clinton and other leading Democrats urged that abortions be safe and rare. But liberals have come a long way, baby -- in a monstrous direction.

2019 Democrat presidential nomination candidates like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker proclaim at every opportunity their whole-hearted devotion to the deceptive "reproductive rights" and "women's health" causes. 

(It is surely hoped that, like "limited death penalty," those deceptive slogans make calculated inhumanity politically palatable.)

Entertainers encourage fans to "shout your abortions." Lena Dunham even expressed regret that she has never killed a baby. 

Abortion enthusiasts today press partial and post-birth infanticide with gruesome fervor. Related legislation was proposed in Virginia by Democrat state Del. Kathy Tran. It was applauded by that state's wicked Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam. A similar bill was recently signed into law by NY Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

In video of Cuomo's signing event, his allies were seen cheering the evil act. It was the stomach-turning product of the limited legislation lie.

The case against an Iowa death penalty
by DC Larson                  

The Associated Press reported that a death penalty bill has passed in Iowa's Senate Judiciary Committee by 8-7. According to the AP, two Republican members of Iowa's senate opposed the bill.

It is now eligible for debate by the full body.

Iowa abolished executions in 1965. I have for decades been a stalwart opponent of the death penalty. I can, in fact, quote Clarence Darrow's legendary trial summations on it. And as a lifelong Iowan, I've always been proud of our state's status as one in which executions are not allowed by law.

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. But I understand that is a subjective opinion, and not one others share. So, on to the following reasons.

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. That is supposed to be a goal of the justice system.

I believe that sound view alone is sufficient cause for being against capital punishment. But when I returned to the Catholic Church, last year, it was joined by another fine reason.

3) The Catholic Church counts capital punishment opposition among its fine principles. Persons convicted of capital offenses who've not yet accepted Divine authority are denied that precious potentiality by the executioner's hand. 

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.

Protecting life is a value advanced by Republicans when it comes to abortion and assisted suicide. this is another area where that interest can be defended.

And Republicans and Democrats for whom life is sacred can find common ground, here. One Democrat opponent of the bill was Sen. Kevin Kinney. As a sheriff's deputy, he helped investigate the 2005 kidnapping, rape, and murder of 10 year-old Jetseta Gage by a convicted sex offender.

Kinney is of the opinion that life imprisonment, assumedly without the possibility of parole, is a more severe punishment than execution. "Killing's too good for 'em," as movie characters used to say. 

Come to think of it, that's a good fourth reason to oppose Iowa resumption of the death penalty.

'Waterloo's DC Larson's is an independent. His essays championing the Trump candidacy and presidency ran in newspapers across Iowa,including the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and Marshalltown Times-Republican. Essays by him have run in Daily Caller, American Thinker, and elsewhere. His political books include "That a Man Can Again Stand Up: American Spirit vs sedition during the incipient Trump Revolution" and "Ideas Afoot: political commentary, cultural observations, and media analyses." And his political blog is American Scene Magazine.'

Democrats again embrace bigotry       

One-time minor-league entertainment notable Sarah Silverman isn't good for much. But this comparison is one time she is instructive.

In 2015, touring comedians like Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld were critical of college audiences' PC restrictiveness. But not Silverman.

"You have to listen to the college-aged, because they lead the revolution," is how she explained her flimsy-spined willingness to accept trendy message-scissoring, as quoted in 2015 by AVClub.com.

Like Simple Sarah, the Democrat Party leadership seems to have no unvarying principle save for status-retention. They've apparently calculated that change must come, regardless of its quality. 

To survive, albeit as gruesome behemoth, that party has now embraced hatred.

In the aftermath of the flood of ugly anti-Semitism that gushed from Rep. Ilhan Omar's heart via her mouth, more than a few Democrat Party leaders and liberal mainstream media hacks rose to defend her against perfectly legitimate criticism.

Those included Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the Washington Post, Roll Call's Emily Kopp, Jon Shwarz of the Intercept, and pretty much everyone who cashes checks signed by Andrew Lack or Jeff Zucker.

And I've already lost track of how many other liberal news media figures have galloped into broadcast with tortured defenses of bigotry that all good people once considered indefensible.

"Democrats have become an anti-Israel party," President Trump recently told White House reporters. "They've become an anti-Jewish party."

Democrats effectively sanctioned Omar's articulated evil. The resolution they ultimately produced did not explicitly name her or cite her statements, but watered down the point of the whole thing by cramming in every other form of prejudice imaginable.

"Today is historic on many fronts," wrote Omar and fellow Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rachel Tlaib, in a triumphant joint statement. "It's the first time we have voted on a resolution condemning anti-Muslim bigotry in our nation's history."

So, what began as a specific reaction to Omar's anti-Jewish hate was turned from that noble task to a bland pronouncement more to her preference. The villain became the victor.

"Today's resolution vote was a sham put forward by Democrats to avoid condemning one of their own and denouncing vile anti-Semitism," said House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney.

Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, and Tlaib have led the Democrat Party onto a vile boulevard that party's heads used to decry. The ease with which those party officials reversed their anti-Semitism opposition illustrates smallness of character.

But unseemly indulgence of anti-Semitism is not contemporary Democrats' sole offense.

American Catholics were once dependable Democrat voters. I grew up in the late '60s and recall Irish-Catholic families hanging JFK portraits in their homes. (My wife and I presently have one of President Trump hanging in our living room.)

In recent times, more and more national Democrats have attacked Catholicism.

"The dogma lives loudly within you,  and that's a concern," Sen. Dianne Feinstein intoned dramatically of Catholic appeals court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. Many observers, including Sen. Orrin Hatch, charged the Democrat had violated the Constitution's "religious test" prohibition.

Democrat Senators Kamala Harris and Maize Hirono challenged Judge Brian C. Buescher, who would possibly serve on the United States District Court for Nebraska, on his membership in the pro-traditional values Catholic Knights of Columbus. 

For them and like-minded Democrat colleagues, religious testing of Catholics is all the rage.

It has become common for congressional Democrats and their news media accomplices to savage Catholic Church teachings and traditions. One need only read daily papers to find fresh evidence.

Taking a step back, we can see that Democrats' hostility toward traditionally respected and influential American faiths is of a part with the general out-with-the-old-and-in-with-the-new sensibility guiding them. 

That has seen challenges to Constitutional rights to free speech and gun ownership; historical revisionism in academia; the tearing down of venerable statuary; attempted erasure of national boundaries, sovereignty, and citizenship significance; and even disputation of our country's very right to exist.

This is, of course, far from the first time the Democrat Party has
supported bigotry. Historians like author Dinesh D'Souza recall the majority of slaveholders belonged to that party, and that elected Southern Democrats long protected both that institution and the Jim Crow laws that followed. 

The Ku Klux Klan began as a Democrat vehicle. Sen. Al Gore, Sr. filibustered against the 1965 Civil Rights Act, which was opposed by a majority of Democrats but supported by most Republicans.

Today, powerful Washington Democrats apparently reason that traditional American ideals of equality and nondiscrimination should be jettisoned in favor of Radical Islamic prejudices, and that party candidates can win future elections without the votes of Catholics and Jews.

I hope for the good of America that Democrats are again wrong. 

Consider jurors without racial prejudice

In August, 2018, illegal alien Cristhian Behena-Rivera was charged for the murder of Iowa college student Molly Tibbetts. He has asked that his trial be moved from Poweshiek County, where the alleged crime occurred and where he lived, to a county with greater Hispanic population. 

According to recent reporting, the suspect's attorneys claim to have spoken with numerous Hispanic potential witnesses who feared testifying might bring retribution. 

"These individuals fear reprisals from locals who hold strong opinions concerning Latinos following [Rivera] being charged,' the attorneys wrote in a motion.

The defendant's lawyers asked that his nationality be considered when selecting a new county.

"Without a venue where a minority population is substantially represented, [Rivera] cannot be fairly tried and any jury pool chosen will have to be stricken," they asserted in their motion.

The attorneys also swiped at President Trump. They charged immigration comments he and Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds made had contributed to "fanning the flames of prejudice and jeopardizing the fairness of these proceedings..."

But it is Behane-Rivera's counsel that is appealing to racial prejudice. The implications are that whites, as a group, cannot be trusted to make decisions based solely on facts; that we would render them as dictated by a supposedly inherent racism inclination; and that it is reasonable to assume we would react unlawfully and violently to courtroom participation we disliked. 

It is a false, insulting argument that an entire group is untrustworthy and inclined toward discrimination because of an immutable characteristic. 

To bolster their advocacy of racially arranged juries, some point to decades-old instances where related animosities were exercised against minority defendants by all-white juries.

But past injustices cannot fairly be thought evidential of current-day realities. It is that fundamentally faulty thinking that engenders contemporary voting rights legislation based illogically on dust-covered findings. 

Attitudes evolve over time. Jurors and regions today aren't bound to their predecessors' records. 

Examination of present-day evidence is required, not uncritical reliance on data produced 50 or 60 years ago. Justifications for judicial or legislative standards that might have been sound in their distant moments are not necessarily creditable, now.

The Constitution does require that defendants be reviewed by a jury of their peers. To my thinking, "peers" means fellow citizens, not exclusively those of like hue (or sex).

I once spoke with a young white woman whose black boyfriend had just successfully challenged a jury on the basis of racial non-representation. The women allowed that, yes, her boyfriend had committed the crime alleged. But, she said, triumphantly, he had avoided prosecution by challenging his jury's all-white composition.

I just stared back. I'm a white guy who's married to a black woman. As I said, the white woman with whom I spoke was also in an interracial relationship.

Our own situations disproved the nasty idea that all whites can reasonably be suspected to harbor bigotry. And no, we weren't exceptions to a rule. Exceptions don't prove rules, they defeat them.

It is rightly forbidden for a lawyer to strike potential jurors for reasons of race. But insisting that jurors must represent this or that racial group is just the other side of the same bad coin.

In fact, not considering jurors as individuals with particular backgrounds, experiences, ideas, and values is textbook racism. Show me a man who believes jurors can be assumed trustworthy or not owing to skin color, and I'll show you a racist.

Judging people's characters by their skin tones is both unfair to them and injurious to our society. We're supposed to be better than that. Some of us sincerely believe in ideals of equality and unity.

It is correct for defendants to insist that they be assumed innocent until proved guilty. Jurors also deserve that.