“Freedom”

Here is the freedom the Progressive-Democratic Party and its Leftist supporters will allow.

The Association of Library Service to Children‘s (ALSC) board voted unanimously on Saturday to rename the “Laura Ingalls Wilder Award” as the “Children’s Literature Legacy Award.”

Why?  Because her books depicted the stereotypes of a bygone age, and so she must be purged.  This is on a par with “liberal” schools purging books by “old, dead, white guys” from their literature curriculum, as though those thoughts, ideas, philosophies had no impact on the evolution of Western Civilization.

We have the Southern Poverty Law Center labeling Conservatives variously as terrorists or Nazis.  We have Facebook and Twitter censoring conservative news reports and accounts, all in the name of blocking “fake” news.

 

Then there’s the Progressive-Democrat Congressmen.

Recall the intern who yelled “Mr. President, f— you!” across the Capitol Rotunda.  She works—still—for Senator Maggie Hassan (D, NH).  The intern was suspended, but Hassan has kept her on Hassan’s payroll.

There’s House’s Hispanic Caucus heckling President Donald Trump in the Capital Building, disrupting his activities.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D, CA) has called for anyone working in the Executive Branch to be harassed wherever they go—restaurants, gas stations, department stores, she named it.  And not just protest: harass and drive, physically, from the public square.

The Progressive-Democrats in Congress actively oppose any sort of immigration reform—especially including securing our borders—in large part because they oppose anything Republican, but in equally large part because they don’t want the US to have secure borders; they don’t believe we Americans should be able to determine for ourselves who we let in and under what circumstances.  Never mind that this includes violent criminals, drug purveyors, terrorists.  It’s true that these are a small minority of those who want to enter the US, but the damage these persons do to our communities can be catastrophic.  Those Congressmen don’t seem to care, though, so deeply imbedded are they in their open borders ideology.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) even has said in so many words

The only way we’re going to work with him [Trump] is if he moves completely in our direction and abandons his Republican colleagues[.]

 

Violence is well within the Progressive-Democrats’ and their Leftist supporters’ tool kit.

We have the Left driving a White House Press Secretary and her family from a restaurant, with the restaurant owner’s enthusiastic assistance.  We have Left thugs physically confronting the Florida Attorney General and her family at a movie theater.  We have Left thugs driving the DHS Secretary and her family from a restaurant.  These thugs also “gathered” at her home to continue the assault.

Keep in mind Waters’ call.

We have BLM assaulting speakers and preventing them from speaking.  We have Antifa thugs attacking conservative rallies.  We have Left thugs bringing flamethrowers to a far right rally.

And a Leftist murderer wannabe shot up a Republican baseball practice, wounding several and nearly killing House Republican Whip Steve Scalise.

 

We have the Left publishing the (stolen) personal contact information—including home addresses—of the men and women of ICE and their families with “encouragement” to go to those homes and harass the agents and their families.

Hollywood especially enjoys attacking the women of the Trump administration.

Chelsea Handler called Sarah [Sanders, WH Press Secretary] a “harlot” and “trollop” on her show.

And

Jimmy Kimmel mocked her [Melania Trump’s] accent

And Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a “feckless c___.”

And Peter Fonda called via his Twitter account to “rip Barron Trump from his mother’s arms and put him in a cage with pedophiles.”

 

The NLMSM is in on the act, too.

Jennifer Rubin wrote that it is “both natural and appropriate for decent human beings to shame and shun the practitioners” of Trump’s immigration policy.

And there’s Ali Watkins, late of The New York Times, who had affairs with two of her…sources…in order to get “leaks” of anti-Trump information.  It’s true enough that Watkins is no longer with the NYT, but only because she got caught.  The NYT turned blind eye to her escapades for as long as they could.

 

This is what we can look forward to if the Progressive-Democrats gain control of the House or Senate, much less if they gain control of both.  Not only will we be free to speak only what the Progressive-Democrats permit us to speak, to read only what the Progressive-Democrats will permit us to read, to worship only within the parameters permitted by the Progressive-Democrats, they will violently suppress any effort to do otherwise.

Make no mistake, either: this will come to pass if we sit on our hands come voting time this fall.

Reform at the FBI?

FBI Director Christopher Wray said he takes the DoJ IG report castigating the FBI’s performance on the Clinton email scandal seriously.

He [Wray] ordered training for senior executives on the report’s lessons….

Really? These guys are senior executives–they already knew what they were doing, and they knew at the time that what they were doing was wrong. They should be fired for cause.

So far, it looks like Wray is just engaged in the emptiness of sound and fury.

A Thought on Nationhood

Germany has one, and it centers on immigrants assimilating into German culture rather than holding themselves apart while taking advantage of the German benefits that drew the immigrants in the first place.  It’s articulated by Joachim Gauck, President of Germany from 2012-2017.  He told Bild

“I find it unacceptable that people who have been living in Germany for decades cannot hold a conversation in German, do not attend parent-teacher conferences or keep their children from going to classes or sports.”

He said people should not shy away from standing up for German values out of fear of being seen as a racist or xenophobe and that there should be “something like binding rules for living together and not several societies alongside one another.”

Absolutely.  A nation’s culture, its ability to rule itself, its very existence are at risk when immigrants as large groups don’t assimilate, and the receiving nation allows that to occur.  The nation ceases to be; it devolves into a collection of disparate groupings who happen to occupy a geographic area.

Most of What They Wanted

Recall that, in a breathtaking attack on Italy’s democracy, the nation’s President Sergio Mattarella vetoed formation of the coalition government that hard-Left 5Star Movement and hard-Right League, as the two winners of Italy’s elections, had formed because Mattarella didn’t like the coalition’s choice for Economics Minister, Paolo Savona.  Mattarella held Savona personally unacceptable over the latter’s disdain for the euro and for the European Union.

5Star and League have formed a new coalition, and it seems that Mattarella has approved the new coalition.  The coalition’s Econ Minister will be Giovanni Tria, an economist from the Tor Vergata University.  Tria has “criticized the eurozone, saying it had failed to achieve the convergence of the different economies;” he doesn’t seem that far from Savona’s position or from the coalition’s, just perhaps a bit more politic in expressing it.

Also, far from being banished to the sticks, Savona also will get a position in the new government: Minister for European Affairs.  The position has no formal portfolio, but he’ll still be in a position of influence and in the venue for which he was found ill-suited by Matterella.

Maybe Mattarella is figuring out that he’s President of Italy, not a mucky-muck of the EU.

An Argument

…for leaving the European Union altogether.

By openly invoking the role of investors, financial markets and the defense of the eurozone in his speech on Sunday, the president [Italian President Sergio Mattarella] lends credence to the populist argument that Italy has become the battleground in a war between the international establishment and national democracies. Even if populists win the elections, their supporters believe, they will never be allowed to hold power for fear that they would oppose the dogma that dominates the eurozone.

That speech was his rationalization for his decision to block the coalition of the two parties who one the last national elections from forming a government.  With that speech, he demonstrated the fact of the Italian peoples’ belief.

And this from European Commissioner for Budget and Human Resources Günther Oettinger:

…markets will teach Italians how to vote….

And German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s

comparison between Italy and Greece is an unveiled threat: Italians had better toe the line, or they will not be spared what the Greeks have been going through.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors have this one right.

[W]hat is happening in Rome is not only about the future of the euro. It has also to do with the state of democracy, in Italy and in Europe. Discussing and questioning the governance of the eurozone, as the Italian right-left populist coalition wished to do, should not be a taboo in mature democracies.

But national sovereignty be damned, and to hell with democracy and what petty voters want.  That’s the elitist EU attitude.  The worthies of EU governance Know Better.

This is what the Italian people need to think very seriously about in the coming national elections.