I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue & stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms, are… pic.twitter.com/oAuTnxZldf

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) October 11, 2022

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“warmongers”? Sounds like she is going to become a Buchananite Isolationist Republican. Better than a democrat, of course, but…

Ross Clark, in the Spectator, remarks on the irony inherent in revolutionary looting as a collaborative activity involving the National Elite Establishment and the urban canaille. Of course, what we are seeing here is, when you come right down to it, the active physical manifestation of everything today’s democrat party stands for.

That LEGO set or Louis Vuitton bag you’ve always wanted can be yours free if you just wait for the next black suspect to die in police custody. That’s the lesson so far from the riots in Minneapolis, Portland, Atlanta and elsewhere following the death of George Floyd. Arson and luxury looting are not the most obvious ways of fighting racism or police brutality, but at this point riots are a ritual. ‘Antifa’ means bourgeois bolshevism — college-educated mock revolutionaries performing to a predictable script.

This is the most sterile rebellion any country has ever seen. Far from terrifying the establishment, it reflects exactly what is taught in schools and preached over the airwaves and in respectable op-eds. Academics and celebrities have taken to Twitter to assure these wonderful young louts that riots really do reform politics and the civil rights movement was about violence from the beginning. Don’t worry: you’re saving black lives by throwing that brick through a window and lighting a liquor store on fire. You’re just like the Boston Tea Party — only not racist.

This is what significant portions of the opinion-forming classes in America actually believe. There is a spectrum, of course. Some thought leaders cavil more than others about the uncouthness of it all. But even the most delicate of pundits isn’t as bothered by the firebombs and pillaging as he is by Donald Trump’s next tweet: that’s real violence.

RTWT

The democrat nomination this year may go to the most radical candidate in US History with the inevitable consequence of Donald Trump winning by a landslide. Dominic Green contends that if that happens, it will be the leadership of the democrat party’s own fault.

The Democrats are now being unraveled by what Sanders might call the ‘contradictions of capitalism’. While the Democratic leadership was soaking Wall Street and Silicon Valley and pandering to the public sector unions, it outsourced the maintenance of its coalition to the radicals, and indulged them as they built their Potemkin villages of intersectionality. Now, as the party structure hollows out and the party leadership fails convincingly to answer Donald Trump, the radicals have the ground game and the ideology to remake the party from the bottom up. The result is a radically depraved version of the rainbow coalition, with Sanders as its Corbyn-style ‘Magic Grandpa’, a deceptively cuddly fellow traveler determined to ride their youthful exuberance into office.

When Magic Grandpa shakes the money tree, it’s not just that other people’s money falls out. A tangle of poisonous roots is also exposed. A coalition of coalitions has mobilized for Sanders: acrimonious acronyms like the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) and CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), Jew-baiting proxies like Ilhan Omar and Linda Sarsour, woke warriors like IfNotNow and the Justice Dems, and bongwater conspiracists like the Chapo Trap House chaps and the campus wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

RTWT

Richard Fernandez warns that the take-over of the democrat party by the radical left which that party’s leadership has allowed to become its base features consequences going beyond nominations and platforms. We have been seeing some of those consequences recently, as violent, masked ANTIFA protests have become routine. “Doxing” and pressuring corporations to fire political opponents, a little while ago, seemed to mark extraordinarily extreme expressions of political opposition, but more recently physical attacks in public places have escalated from thrown milkshakes to quick-drying cement shakes and punches. Last Saturday’s attack by ANTIFA demonstrators on Quilette editor Andrew Ngo, a harmless Gay wimp, has been widely suspected of being effectively condoned by Portland’s democrat mayor’s office. Portland police did not interfere in the attack, and are assumed to have been operating in accordance with a hands-off ANTIFA demonstrations policy in place since at least last year. A spokesman for Portland police defensively told reporters there was “no evidence” that the police stood by deliberately and let people be attacked, and said that three people had been arrested in connection with the demonstration, including one for assault. They did not identify the person charged, however, as being involved with the attack on Andrew Ngo.

[T]he magnitude of Hillary’s 2016 loss is only now becoming apparent. Clinton didn’t just lose the White House, she also lost the Democratic center to the radical ornaments. The diminution of Brooks, Stevens, Kristof, and even Biden are the consequence of that defeat. The radicals who once served the useful purpose of putting fear into the other side are taking center stage. It’s not surprising that the French Terror began with the purge of the moderates and the urgency of virtue. As Robespierre put it, virtuous men have no choice but to employ any means necessary:

If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie.

The Thing is older than one would think. And more voracious. The intellectual Old Bolsheviks thought their illustrious records would protect them from the ruffian Stalin. Bukharin, who was eventually executed by Stalin, once said: “Koba, you used to be grateful for the support of your Bolshevik comrades.” “Gratitude is a dog’s disease,” Stalin shot back.

It won’t stop at Andy Ngo. There is no safety from It.

As Burke observed: “In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.”

Top: murder rate / county
Bottom: 2016 election returns /county

Victor Sharpe and Robert Vincent marvel at how accustomed we have all become to the staggering level of mainstream media bias in favor of democrats.

t seems that most Americans operate on the assumption that the media is making a good-faith, if imperfect, effort at objectively informing its audience. That so few are genuinely aware of the outrageous manipulation of public opinion now taking place is the single greatest threat to the republic, to the extent that we can even say that our republic still exists. A glaring example of this would be the treatment of Nixon 42 years ago over Watergate compared with the treatment of Obama today over any one of several far worse scandals.

It was recently reported in the WSJ that Obama used the NSA to spy on Congress during the deliberations related to the Iran nuclear deal. It was reported on at one time, but this story has now disappeared completely from media coverage. Consider the implications.

In the former case, Nixon apparently directed or sat by and knowingly let his immediate subordinates direct a third-rate burglary of the campaign headquarters of an election opponent. In the latter case, Obama authorized one of the most sophisticated intelligence-gathering organizations in the world to spy on American legislators, en masse, in pursuit of the most important – and egregiously flawed – international agreement impacting American national security and world stability – namely, with the chief sponsor of international terrorism: the Islamic Republic of Iran.

This is a thousand times worse than Watergate! Where is the media? Where are today’s equivalents of Woodward and Bernstein? The media doesn’t focus on this outrage at all, so to the overwhelming majority of the public, it is as though this never even happened. And this is only one of several comparable scandals we could name. …

[I]n 2012, during an unintentional “open mic” moment, we overheard Obama making assurances to Russian president Medvedev that once he was able to get past the election, he would have “more flexibility.”

Here we have a sitting U.S. president apparently ready to make some huge concession to America’s most important major power rival on the world stage, a concession so drastic that it apparently couldn’t even be revealed until after the election. And the media did not hound him over this.

Could one imagine a President Nixon, or a President Reagan, making such a statement during arms control negotiations with the USSR and the media simply giving it a pass?. …

How about the qualifications of Bernie Sanders, who did not so much as earn a regular paycheck until he was 40, who ran for Congress while collecting unemployment, who supported himself for a time writing about masturbation and rape fantasies for leftist publications, who has served in Congress for 25 years without having written even one piece of legislation that ever passed?

Read the whole thing.