“When you’re violent and cursing and screaming and blocking me from walking into a movie, there’s something wrong,” said one top GOP official.
Marc Caputo and Daniel Lippman report: Two senior Trump administration officials were heckled at restaurants. A third was denied service. Florida GOP Attorney General Pam Bondi required a police escort away from a movie about Mister Rogers after activists yelled at her in Tampa — where two other Republican lawmakers say they were also politically harassed last week, one of them with her kids in tow.
In the Donald Trump era, the left is as aggressively confrontational as anyone can remember.
Passers-by gather to take photos in front of the Red Hen Restaurant on June 23, in Lexington, Virginia. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Saturday that she was booted from the Virginia establishment because she works for President Donald Trump. | Daniel LIn/AP Photo
What it means for 2018 — whether it portends a blue wave of populist revolt for Democrats or a red wall of silent majority resistance from Republicans — largely depends on one’s political persuasion. But there’s a bipartisan sense that this election season marks another inflection point in the collapse of civil political discourse.
Few disagree that Democrats are marching, protesting and confronting Republican officials with more intensity during the midterm elections than at any time in decades. The progressive fervor recalls conservative opposition to the previous president in his first midterm, when Democratic members of Congress were left running from disruptive town halls and ended up being crushed at the polls in November.
“If you see anybody from that Cabinet — in a restaurant, in 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,” implored California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters at a Saturday rally, prompting an immediate conservative backlash on social media.
The intense, in-your-face approach toward public officials is only expected to intensify, fueled by social media and what appears to be an increasingly polarized and angry electorate. Read the rest of this entry »
LAWBREAKERS, LAWMAKERS: In some parts of Chicago, violent street gangs and pols quietly trade money and favors for mutual gain. The thugs flourish, the elected officials thrive—and you lose.
From Jan 2012, David Bernstein and Noah Isackson write: A few months before last February’s citywide elections, Hal Baskin’s phone started ringing. And ringing. Most of the callers were candidates for Chicago City Council, seeking the kind of help Baskin was uniquely qualified to provide.
Baskin isn’t a slick campaign strategist. He’s a former gang leader and, for several decades, a community activist who now operates a neighborhood center that aims to keep kids off the streets. Baskin has deep contacts inside the South Side’s complex network of politicians, community organizations, and street gangs. as he recalls, the inquiring candidates wanted to know: “Who do I need to be talking to so I can get the gangs on board?”
Baskin—who was himself a candidate in the 16th Ward aldermanic race, which he would lose—was happy to oblige. In all, he says, he helped broker meetings between roughly 30 politicians (ten sitting aldermen and 20 candidates for City Council) and at least six gang representatives. That claim is backed up by two other community activists, Harold Davis Jr. and Kublai K. M. Toure, who worked with Baskin to arrange the meetings, and a third participant, also a community activist, who requested anonymity. The gang representatives were former chiefs who had walked away from day-to-day thug life, but they were still respected on the streets and wielded enough influence to mobilize active gang members.
The first meeting, according to Baskin, occurred in early November 2010, right before the statewide general election; more gatherings followed in the run-up to the February 2011 municipal elections. The venues included office buildings, restaurants, and law offices. (By all accounts, similar meetings took place across the city before last year’s elections and in elections past, including after hours at the Garfield Center, a taxpayer-financed facility on the West Side that is used by the city’s Department of Family and Support Services.)
At some of the meetings, the politicians arrived with campaign materials and occasionally with aides. The sessions were organized much like corporate-style job fairs. The gang representatives conducted hourlong interviews, one after the other, talking to as many as five candidates in a single evening. Like supplicants, the politicians came into the room alone and sat before the gang representatives, who sat behind a long table. “One candidate said, ‘I feel like I’m in the hot seat,’” recalls Baskin. “And they were.”
The former chieftains, several of them ex-convicts, represented some of the most notorious gangs on the South and West Sides, including the Vice Lords, Gangster Disciples, Black Disciples, Cobras, Black P Stones, and Black Gangsters. Before the election, the gangs agreed to set aside decades-old rivalries and bloody vendettas to operate as a unified political force, which they called Black United Voters of Chicago. “They realized that if they came together, they could get the politicians to come to them,” explains Baskin. Read the rest of this entry »
We recently discussed the courageous stand of the University of Chicago in favor of free speech (a position followed by schools like Purdue). Free speech is being rapidly diminished on our campuses as an ever-widening scope of speech has been declared hate speech or part of the ill-defined “microaggression.” Now Berkeley has shown the world exactly what this intolerance looks like as protesters attacked people, burned property, and rioted to stop other people from hearing the views of a conservative speaker. As on so many campuses, they succeeded. The speech by Milo Yiannopoulos was cancelled. A triumph of anti-speech protesters. Berkeley now must face a defining moment. The only appropriate response for the school is to immediately reschedule the speaker and stand in defiance of those who want to deny the right to speak (and to hear and associate) to others. Moreover, it is liberals who should be on…
Michael Barone writes: Something like that is happening now — but the violence is coming from leftists, not Trumpists. Take the University of California, Berkeley, [long pause] please. That’s where a speech to the Young Republicans by rightist provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was shut down by a screaming mob on February 1, as this eyewitness account from Power Line’s Steven Hayward records. Not only was the speech shut down, but gangs of ski-masked and bandana-wearing protesters roamed the streets just off campus with sledgehammers, smashing ATM machines. In one instance, Hayward reports, a 62-year-old Republican who voted for Hillary Clinton held up a sign reading “1st Amendment Protects All Speech” and, on the obverse side, “Even Milo’s” was punched in the nose and dropped to the ground.
Where were the police? Not in a position to help—by design. In this “lethal, horror situation,” said University of California Berkeley campus police chief Margo Bennett, according to the Los Angeles Times. “We have to do exactly what we did last night: to show tremendous restraint.”
They made just one arrest. As for City of Berkeley police, according to the San Francisco Chronicle they came equipped with riot gear, but “as the violence escalated, officers pulled back.” Police on a balcony ordered rioters to disperse, but made no move to stop them, supposedly to prevent injury to “innocent protesters and bystanders.” City police made no arrests. “Our primary objective with the resources we had was the protection of life.” Read the rest of this entry »
…Those who are pushing for sustained street resistance seem to be banking on two things. First they are betting that mainstream Americans won’t realize until it’s too late that we are in the midst of a virtual civil war that could turn violent. Dennis Pragerrecently wrote of this Second Civil War, warning Americans to wake up to it. Second, agitators are also wagering that Americans will not have the stomach for the prolonged fight they intend to bring to the streets, a point noted by psychologist Tim Daughtry in his book “Waking the Sleeping Giant.”
“What brought us to this place where the losing side has so utterly and violently rejected the peaceful transfer of power from one president to another, and previously agreed-upon electoral process and rules?”
So is this some kind of a joke? Revolution in the streets of America that overturns the election results? So far it all sounds so goofy, at least where it doesn’t get violent. We can watch in wonder as a shrieking NYU professor verbally assaults numerous police officers with the sort of impunity only afforded to the far-left. We can assure ourselves that there aren’t that many irrational people. Even if true, however, that’s beside the point. Too many citizens are at sea in understanding what freedom even means.
“Let’s face it. Today’s street theater is the culmination of decades of radical education revision. The radical Left’s systematic attack on the study of Western Civilization has essentially been an attack against the study of any and all civil societies. It is an attack on the features that make a society civil and free.”
We need to ask ourselves: What brought us to this place where the losing side has so utterly and violently rejected the peaceful transfer of power from one president to another, and previously agreed-upon electoral process and rules? It’s past time to ponder the quote from Thomas Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
Destroying Our Education System Got Us Here
Let’s face it. Today’s street theater is the culmination of decades of radical education revision. The radical Left’s systematic attack on the study of Western Civilization has essentially been an attack against the study of any and all civil societies. It is an attack on the features that make a society civil and free. Those features include freedom of expression, civil discourse, the Socratic method of figuring out truth, value of the individual, and a common knowledge of the classics of history and literature that help us understand what’s universal in the human experience. All of that had to go.
Now, as we see students marching to demonize as “fascists” proponents of free speech, their ignorance is in full view. This is really a full frontal attack on the rule of law, the Constitution, and a system of checks and balances that guards against the consolidation of centralized power.
“The last 50 years have produced a huge wave of kids who are functionally uneducated.” https://t.co/4r0v3Lv6tm
That’s the whole point of the education these students have been fed. In fact, a lot of 1960s agitators, including domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, decided to place their bets on radical education revision. For at least 40 years, Ayers has been devoted to transforming schools from places of actual education to places of coercive thought reform. As Andrew McCarthy recently pointed out in National Review: “It was a comfy fit for him and many of his confederates, once it dawned on them that indoctrination inside the schoolhouse was more effective than blowing up the schoolhouse.”
If you review the history of radical education reform, it’s clear these agitators have been committing mind arson on the children, undermining their ability to think independently and clearly. (For more on this, read Robin Eubanks’ book “Credentialed to Destroy.”)
How to Short-Circuit a Child’s Thinking
Radical education reformers have made a point of removing context from children’s education, and to squash their natural curiosity, undermining their capacity to think. Read the rest of this entry »
…Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes‘ lecture at NYU was cancelled halfway through amid protests and violence. McInnes has a history of controversial and intentionally provocative statements, saying in the past that transphobia should be encouraged and that feminism makes women unhappy.
Several disruptive students were arrested by police after McInnes was reportedly pepper-sprayed by a critic. But in video taken at the scene that went viral, the professor denounced police for arresting the students and demanded they attack McInnes.
Watch above, via YouTube (starting at around 10:07)
“Who’s protecting NYU from this bullshit?” she shouted. “Why are you here? You’re not here to protect these students from Nazis? No, you’re not!”
“How dare you assholes protect Neo-Nazis? Fuck you! Fuck you!” she shouted. “They’re trying to learn about human rights and against racism and xenophobia and LGBTQ rights and you’re letting these fucking Neo-Nazis near here!” Read the rest of this entry »
Ugyur maintained that there is no way to know who the protesters are even though anti-fascist “black bloc” protesters have essentially taken credit for the violence.
Kasparian chimed in that it could be a “clever strategy by the right.”
“Could the right-wing come in masked? Could it be 4chan guys who come in to cause trouble so they can then turn around and do exactly what they did today, ‘Oh you have to take away the funding from Berkeley?,’” Uygur asked. Read the rest of this entry »
“I wrote a book called ‘Liberal Fascism’ about a decade ago, and even then the best working definition of a Fascist in America is ‘a conservative who’s winning an argument’. The way the Left operates, they just try to shout down anyone who disagrees with them, these campuses are little, sort of soft-Totalitarian states where disagreements is actually a heresy.”
“By all means, Milo has a right to speak, he has free speech rights, they should have let him speak, the far smarter strategy would be to ignore these things, but the clampdown on free speech that’s more troubling is when they block people like Condoleeza Rice from being able to give a speech. The whole point to protecting outrageous speech is that it keeps the zone of speech for reasonable important speech safer, the way they do this kind of stuff is so counterproductive, it feeds into the worse impulses on both the right and the left, and Berkeley, and the administration of Berkeley should be ashamed of itself.”
The circumstances under which the victim was shot remains unclear.
A man was shot Friday night on the University of Washington campus during a protest for a controversial speaker, and the suspected shooter turned himself in claiming self defense, police said.
A large crowd packed the Red Square area of campus Friday night protesting a speech by controversial Brietbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos. Police were blocking the entrance to Kane Hall, and investigators said bricks and paint were thrown at officers.
“The person of interest in the shooting … turned himself in to University of Washington police. He is now being questioned about the incident.”
— the Seattle mayor’s office said in a statement.
Medics received the shooting report at 8:26 p.m., after Yiannopoulos’ speech began in Kane Hall, but while a large crowd of protesters remained outside.
UW students were alerted to the suspected shooters arrest early Saturday morning. He was being questioned early Saturday morning by UW police, who are handling the investigation.
The shooting victim is 32 and suffered a life-threatening gunshot wound to the abdomen, Seattle police said. He was in critical condition at Harborview Medical Center, and was previously identified by authorities as a 25-year-old…(read more)
Person of Interest in Shooting at UW Protest Turns Himself In
David Caplan and Karma Allan report: A person of interest in the Friday night shooting of a man at a protest at the University of Washington has turned himself in, the office of Seattle mayor Edward Murray announced early Saturday morning.
“My prayers are with the victim, whoever he is.”
— Milo Yiannopoulos
“The person of interest in the shooting … turned himself in to University of Washington police,” the mayor’s office said in a statement. “He is now being questioned about the incident.” The University of Washington Police Department is handling the shooting investigation, with support from Seattle Police Department detectives.
The 32-year-old victim was hospitalized with a possible life-threatening injury after being shot by the suspect in the abdomen at the protest, which according to ABC affiliate KOMO, was pegged to the slated 7:30 p.m. speaking engagement of alt-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos. Some were also protesting Donald Trump’s presidency. Read the rest of this entry »
SEATTLE — A man was shot at a University of Washington protest in the campus’ Red Square outside an event with controversial Brietbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos, CBS affiliate KIRO reports.
Seattle Fire Department said that the man has possible life threatening injuries.
“Adult male transported to HMC with possible life threatening injury from a gun shot wound. Pt transported from area near Spokane Ln NE”
The University of Washington College Republicans invited Yiannopoulos to speak on Friday. People have been waiting outside for the event since around 5 p.m.
…An online petition asked UW president Ana Mari Cauce to ban Yiannopoulos from the event.
“Please make the right choice President Ana Mari Cauce and stand up for student safety and tolerance on campus. Please stand with us – your students, faculty, staff, workers, and community members in opposing this hatred from being spread on our campus,” the petition said.
Discriminatory harassment. Official Censorship policy: “Discriminatory harassment” (censored speech) is language or conduct directed at a person because of the person’s race, color, creed, religion, national origin, citizenship, sex, age, pregnancy, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, or veteran status that is unwelcome and sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive such that it could reasonably be expected to create an intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment, or has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with a person’s academic or work performance, or the person’s ability to participate in or benefit from the university’s programs, services, opportunities, or activities.
Protesters threw rocks, fireworks, and other items at officers. They blocked the entrance to Kane Hall, but Yiannopoulos’ speech still started around 8 p.m.
“Seattle officers at the park had confiscated wooden poles, heavy pipes and hammers.”
A KIRO chopper caught video of bike officers rushing to a crowd of people at 8:30 p.m. Moments later they started responding to a man on the ground.
A man slashed a policewoman’s face with a machete and shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ before her fellow officer gunned him down in a chilling ‘terror’ attack.
The attacker reportedly walked up to two policewomen at the entrance of the police station in the Belgian city of Charleroi just before 4pm, pulled a machete from his bag and hacked at the officer.
After slamming the machete into the face of one officer, he then turned to another and began swinging the massive blade at her.
A third female officer raced to the front desk and then blasted the attacker in the chest and leg – knocking him to the ground.
Emergency crews then raced to the scene and began treating the policewomen – one of who was left with massive, deep cuts to her face.
Her colleague was only slightly injured but the attacker, who has not been named, died later in hospital. Read the rest of this entry »
Racial discontent is at its highest point in the Obama presidency and at the same level as America after the 1992 Rodney King riots.
Sixty-nine percent of Americans say race relations are generally bad, one of the highest levels of discord since the 1992 riots in Los Angeles during the Rodney King case, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
The poll, conducted from Friday, the day after the killing of five Dallas police officers, until Tuesday, found that six in 10 Americans say race relations were growing worse, up from 38 percent a year ago.
Racial discontent is at its highest point in the Obama presidency and at the same level as after the riots touched off by the 1992 acquittal of Los Angeles police officers charged in Mr. King’s beating.
Relations between black Americans and the police have become so brittle that more than half of black people say they were not surprised by the attack that killed five police officers and wounded nine others in Dallas last week. Nearly half of white Americans say that they, too, were unsurprised by the episode, the survey found.
Despite President Obama’s insistence at a memorial service for the fallen officers that the races in the United States are “not as divided as we seem,” the poll found that black and white Americans hold starkly different views on race, particularly regarding the treatment of African-Americans by the police.
Asked whether the police in most communities are more likely to use deadly force against a black person than a white person, three-quarters of African-Americans answered yes, and only about half as many white people agree. Fifty-six percent of whites said that the race of the suspect made no difference in the use of force; only 18 percent of black Americans said so.
When asked to rate the job their local police department was doing, four in five whites said excellent or good; a majority of blacks answered fair or poor. More than two-fifths of black people say the police in their communities make them feel more anxious than safe. By wide margins, whites and Hispanics say the police make them feel safer.
“I have been in situations where the police have made situations worse rather than better,” Ayesha Numan, 22, a black woman living in Kansas City, Mo., said in a follow-up interview. “That’s not to say that I write them off as all bad. I just have to be cautious of how they’re acting around me.”
Mr. Obama on Tuesday spoke at a memorial service in Dallas honoring the officers killed when Micah Johnson, a 25-year-old black Army veteran, opened fire at a protest last Thursday. Last week was among the most wrenching since the Black Lives Matter movement began three years ago: On back-to-back days, videos were released showing the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile at the hands of the police, and the Dallas attack followed a day later. Read the rest of this entry »
By the Numbers is an honest and open discussion, hosted by Raheel Raza president of Muslims Facing Tomorrow, about Muslim opinions and demographics. This is about the acceptance that radical Islam is a bigger problem than most politically correct governments and individuals are ready to admit. Is ISIS, the Islamic State, trying to penetrate the US with the refugee influx, are Muslims radicalised in US soil, are organizations such as CAIR who purport represent American Muslims accepting and liberal or radicalised with links to terror organizations.
Police officials in France say there has been an explosion in a bar near a Paris stadium and a shootout in a Paris restaurant.
BFM television says there were several dead in the restaurant shooting in the 10th arrondissement of the capital. Two police officials confirmed the shooting but had no information about casualties.
One of the police officials said there was a separate explosion near the Stade de France north of Paris. It was unclear if the events were linked.
Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to be publicly named….
Hundreds of the hard-left protesters, and a group calling themselves ‘The Revolutionary Youth’ gathered in the Swiss capital of Bern to call for German-style mass immigration and a change in asylum policy.
Liam Deacon reports: A pro-migrant protest turned violent today, with Swiss police forced to use water cannon and rubber bullets to quell the self-described ‘anti-fascists’ who violated law by demonstrating on an election day.
Hundreds of the hard-left protesters, and a group calling themselves ‘The Revolutionary Youth’ gathered in the Swiss capital of Bern to call for German-style mass immigration and a change in asylum policy. The group started to violently clash with local police at around 2pm.
Around 110 people were arrested or detained, local publication Blickreports. A Bern police spokesman referred to “violent attacks” on officers and a “great potential for violence.”
Lee Stranahan writes: A sharp spike in the murder rates of Democrat-controlled cities across America is one of the consequences of the increased tension between police and black Americans; tension that has been stirred up by both the liberal media and by Democrat-aligned radical political activist group Black Lives Matter.
Some blame the increase in violence on the “Ferguson Effect” — officers pulling back on tough enforcement because of the intense focus on police-involved shootings like the one that killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., last August.
In neighborhoods where police have long been viewed with suspicion, people use their cellphones like all-seeing periscopes every time police officers get out of their cars. Officers and the unions that represent them describe a combination of surveillance and skepticism, with body cameras, ACLU recording apps and jeering wherever they go.
This increased pressured on law enforcement is a direct result of radical anti-police activist groups like Black Lives Matter using social media and community organizing to urge inner-city black Americans toward confrontations with the police as they are trying to do their work keeping the public safe.
The latest homicide statistics arrive amid reports that Baltimore police officers have lost confidence in the chain of command and that officers have coordinated a work slowdown by not talking to community members and showing less initiative. The drops in arrests and increase in murders are the result of officers refusing to follow their marching orders, according to one Baltimore officer who spoke with CNN.Read the rest of this entry »
Police officers injured in clashes; mayor imposes overnight curfew starting Tuesday evening
BALTIMORE— Scott Calvert and Kris Maher report: Violent confrontations between demonstrators and police broke out in this city for the second time in three days, hours after thousands of people attended Monday’s funeral for Freddie Gray , a 25-year-old black man who died in police custody this month.
“Right now, we’re seeing unprecedented violence throughout the city.”
— Darryl DeSousa, chief of patrol for the city police department
Fifteen officers were injured and two were hospitalized, police officials said. Earlier Monday a police spokesman said the injuries included broken bones. One patrol car was attacked and at least one more engulfed in flames as looters ransacked stores. A CVS store was looted, then apparently set on fire. At least 27 people were arrested.
“It is so frustrating that people think that this makes sense, to destroy our community.”
— Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake
The altercations took place along several busy intersections near the Mondawmin Mall in northwest Baltimore, in a neighborhood near the church where the funeral was held. Demonstrators pelted lines of police in riot gear with rocks, bricks and other objects.
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake hugs a member of the Gray family during Freddie Gray’s funeral. Photo: Shawn Hubbard for The Wall Street Journal
Police responded with tear gas and set up a cordon seeking to restore order. Chunks of bricks, rocks and broken glass littered the streets, and smoke from burning cars and trash cans rose into the sky. The Maryland Transit Administration closed several subway stops near the unrest, and the Baltimore Orioles baseball game was canceled.
“It began as a cause and is ending in pure ignorance.”
— Sean Berry-Bey, a 33-year-old resident of West Baltimore
“Right now, we’re seeing unprecedented violence throughout the city,” said Darryl DeSousa, chief of patrol for the city police department.
Gov. Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency Monday evening, activating the Maryland National Guard. Maryland State Police troopers arrived on the scene earlier in the evening, as did police from several counties, including Prince George’s County, outside Washington.
Demonstrators throw rocks at police in Baltimore after the funeral of Freddie Gray on Monday. Photo: Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake imposed a citywide 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew beginning Tuesday evening and lasting at least a week. “It is so frustrating that people think that this makes sense, to destroy our community,” the mayor said. Read the rest of this entry »
‘My name is Stephen Henry Richards, and I’m here to inform you that two police officers have been shot, in Ferguson Missouri, due to the violent video game named ‘Minecraft’. Minecraft is teaching young youth violence by shooting, stabbing, PVP, that’s player versus player, and now it’s getting out on the streets.”
Stephen Henry Richards continues,
“These unfortune-nate incidences, where people who are trying to protect us and uphold the law are being shot, by children, and young adults, because they’re coming up to them unsuspected, unaware, and now we have this shooting of two police officers in this United States town of Ferguson Missouri.”
Stephen concludes with an invitation to subscribe to his channel.
“I’m Stephen Henry Richards, and I’ll be back soon to talk about this unfortunate incident, please give me thumbs up to the video, not to what happened, please subscribe, and let me know what you want me to talk about.”
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