Really!?

The CTL-Left Mayor of Portland, OR, is at it now.  He wants the Feds and organizers of a couple of Trump rallies to shut down those rallies.

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said Monday that the “alt-right demonstrations” would only fuel hatred and fear during a time of tragedy.

Never mind that these are pro-Trump rallies that have nothing to do with the NLMSM’s imaginary alt-right.

Never mind that Wheeler clearly wants to impose his concept of free speech: feel free to speak what Wheeler personally approves.  And no other word.

Wheeler is claiming

There is never a place for bigotry or hatred in our community….

My irony meter is pegged.

I have to ask: do Wheeler and guys like him ever listen to what they say, or do they just spout off with whatever happens to pop into their heads at the moment?

Heckler’s Veto

It’s alive and well in Canada, too.  A Canadian named Lorne Grabher had a vanity license plate on his car, one that he’s had for 25 years.  The plate had his name, GRABHER.  You’d think there’d be no problem here, both on its face and from the fact that there’s been no problem for that quarter century.

But no.

The Toronto Sun, as cited at the link, says that “at least one person complained” about that plate, and that’s all it takes.  One special snowflake with more time on her hands than productive work decided she was going to be offended by the plate—she decided it reminded her of then TV star Donald Trump’s remark about where to grab women—and she went crying to the Canadian authorities.  Those authorities agreed with her.

[T]he Transportation Department in Nova Scotia says that while they understand the roots of his surname, members of the public may not understand its context.

Because Canadian governmental authorities think their citizens are as grindingly stupid as our own Progressive-Democrats think we are.

The Gulag

…is back and in full force in Russian-occupied Crimea.  Russian dissidents—Tatars, this time—are being “diagnosed” as insane and locked away in “psychiatric” hospitals.

Since the annexation of the region three years ago many ethnic Tatar activists who oppose the occupation have been arrested and subjected to abuse and imprisonment in outdated mental institutions, said Robert van Voren, a Dutch human rights activist and political scientist.

“The number of cases has increased considerably over the past few years, in particular against Crimean Tatars and Ukrainian activists who oppose Russia’s annexation,” he added.

Just as in the Soviet Russian gulag, conditions are appalling and along with Russian treatment of the “inmates” are intended to retrain them to ways of which Russia approves.  Emil Kurbedinov, a Crimean civil rights lawyer focusing on Tatar civil rights and himself locked up for 10 days, had this:

Some are placed in isolation and are denied their basic needs, such as access to a toilet. Others are housed with multiple people suffering from severe mental health conditions.

The activists are interrogated about their alleged involvement in “extremism” and their views of the government. They are also deprived of the right to speak with their family, or meet their lawyer on a one-to-one basis without a guard being present.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The NLMSM’s Hurt Feelings

The Trump administration had a press gaggle Friday.  A gaggle is a press pool that is a subset of the press who then participate in a press conference, and the members of the pool are responsible for getting the content of the conference to the rest of the press.  The Friday gaggle was an expanded one in that, in addition to the pool itself, additional members of the press were explicitly invited to participate—which of course means yet other members, the vast majority of the press, were not explicitly invited to attend.

The additional invitees included reporters from CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox Business, and Fox News. Not invited were Buzzfeed, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News, the Hill, and Politico.

Therein lies the problem, at least in the minds of the Precious Ones (keep in mind that there would have been no outcry had the gaggle not been expanded).  Buzzfeed, NYT, LAT, et al., have their panties in a wedgie over not having been included when the other outlets were.  They’re so special: how dare the White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, the man who made the decision to expand the gaggle for the occasion and who decided who would be the expanded invitees, not exclude (the Precious Ones’ term—”not invited in as extras” not being the same as “kept out”) those others and include themselves instead?

Indeed, they’ve spent the last several days publishing stories about how they were excluded (again, their term), while not reporting on substantive matters (and while not saying who was included in their stead).  They’ve chosen, instead, to create their special selves as the news instead of being reporters of and opiners on the news.

And they’re confused over why they’re not taken seriously by mainstream America.

Free Speech for Me; You Shut Up

University of Chicago pupils (I can’t call them even students in the scale of pupil-student-scholar) are objecting to non-Left speakers being allowed on “their” campus.

The [pupils] objected to the school’s Institute of Politics’ invitation to former Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. They claim that allowing him to speak “normalizes bigotry” and provides a platform for fascism.

These precious ones are actively ducking away from a clear opportunity to “denormalize bigotry” by running away from him.

The coalition of students from U of C Resists, Graduate Students United, Students Working Against Prisons, and UChicago Socialists claim that the school’s “commitment to free expression doesn’t require the institution to host him….

Speech should be free only for the Left, they claim.  They are the epitome of the fascism and bigotry these wondrous ones pretend to oppose.

Alternatively, these precious ones are just so terrified of a different view, just so unconfident of their own reasoning faculties, that they’d rather run screaming for the Midway and avoid debate rather than face the alternatives and demonstrate with rational discourse, logic, and fact the suboptimality of their opponents’ viewpoints.  Or they’re aware of the fragility of their own and so of their own inability to mount a coherent, reasoned demonstration of the superiority of their own.