Tag Archives: morality

The Left’s Favored Antifa

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The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page editors closed their Monday opinion piece with this remark:

The mainstream left ought to denounce it [Antifa’s censorious criminality] as much as the right should reject white supremacists.

The right does denounce white supremacists—and all bigots, not only white supremacists. We get called out by the dishonest Left and its NLMSM for not denouncing only the white supremacists.

Did I say “dishonest Left and its NLMSM?” That the Left chooses to embrace its hate groups and bigots rather than denounce them demonstrates the accuracy of the characterization.

That the Progressive-Democratic Party leadership, including in particular Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) and Senator Diane Feinstein (D, CA) (and the rest of the California contingent, come to that) is studiously silent on these attacks—including Sunday’s Antifa attack, which Berkeley’s police chief permitted—shows clearly where the Party stands on free speech and on freedom generally.

Update: Wednesday–three days after Antifa’s assault–House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi got around to issuing a statement that’s being masqueraded as a condemnation of Antifa:

The violent actions of people calling themselves antifa in Berkeley this weekend deserve unequivocal condemnation, and the perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted.

Notice that: it’s not a condemnation of Antifa, it’s a condemnation of those “calling themselves Antifa.”  Yet the KKK, neo-Nazis, Nazi-wannabes, the NLMSM’s made-up “alt-right” are all Conservatives in her eyes, those of her cronies, and the NLMSM.

Still, her…statement…is more than others of the Progressive-Democratic Party are willing to do.  I’ve seen no statement, however weasel-worded, from House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D, MD), from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY), from Senators Diane Feinstein (D, CA), Elizabeth Warren (D, MA), or Dick Durbin (D, IL), or anyone else from the Left.

The Left and the Left’s Police

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And the misrepresentation of the NLMSM.

A hundred members of Left-wing hate groups, including Antifa—hooded, no less, and armed with clubs—”broke through” police lines in Berkeley Sunday to attack the leader of a Conservative group, Patriot Prayer, which the NLMSM claims is “right-wing” rather than Conservative, and a separate group of four.

Notice that.  The Left’s hate groups are hooded and carrying weapons; their targets are unarmed with faces bare, not looking for trouble and unafraid of being identified.

There’s more:

The protesters who wore hoods to conceal their identities chased Patriot Prayer group leader Joey Gibson from Sunday’s rally in a Berkeley park. As Gibson backed away with his hands in the air, the protesters pepper sprayed him.
…
Separately, the anarchist group beat, kicked and punched four other people at the rally.

How did these thugs “break through” the police lines?  They didn’t.  The police deliberately let them through.

Berkeley Police Chief Andrew Greenwood says police made a strategic decision to let a group of more than 100 black-clad anarchists enter the park Sunday once it became clear there would not be dueling protests between right and left.

He said “the potential use of force became very problematic” because thousands of mostly peaceful left-wing protesters were already inside the park.

Greenwood said he decided to let the black-clad protesters demonstrate in the park because there was “no need for a confrontation over a grass patch.”

Of course, Greenwood knew there would be violence; that’s what  hooded Antifa, et al., were there for.  The confrontation over a grass patch that Greenwood wanted to avoid was between his police and the Left’s hate groups.

Equal protection under law only applies to the Left.  Other Americans don’t deserve it.

This is an Example

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…what the Left wants to destroy; surprisingly, it from HuffPost.  The money excerpt is via Grim’s Hall.

Senator William Mahone was one of the most maligned political leaders in post-Civil War America. He was also one of the most capable. Compared to the Roman traitor Cataline (by Virginia Democrats), to Moses (by African American congressman John Mercer Langston), and to Napoleon (by himself), Mahone organized and led the most successful interracial political alliance in the post-emancipation South. Mahone’s Readjuster Party, an independent coalition of black and white Republicans and white Democrats that was named for its policy of downwardly “readjusting” Virginia’s state debt, governed the state from 1879 to 1883.

During this period, a Readjuster governor occupied the statehouse, two Readjusters represented Virginia in the United States Senate, and Readjusters represented six of Virginia’s ten congressional districts. Under Mahone’s leadership, his coalition controlled the state legislature and the courts, and held and distributed the state’s many coveted federal offices. A black-majority party, the Readjusters legitimated and promoted African American citizenship and political power by supporting black suffrage, office-holding, and jury service. To a degree previously unseen in Virginia, and unmatched anywhere else in the nineteenth-century South, the Readjusters became an institutional force for the protection and advancement of black rights and interests….

The Readjusters lost power in 1883 through a Democratic campaign of violence, electoral fraud, and appeals to white solidarity. While Democrats suppressed progressive politics in the state, other groups of elite white Virginians worked fast to eradicate the memory of Virginia’s experiment in interracial democracy.

All because Mahone also was a slaveholder, and oh, by the way, a secessionist.  Secessionist.  The Civil War was about the legitimacy of slavery, to be sure.  It was, though, also very much about States’ rights under the 10th Amendment, particularly the right to leave the Union, to go out from a government with which it no longer could agree in any material form.

This is a critical part of our history that has been very nearly purged from our schools and our national story by the Left; this is what the Left hopes to achieve by its drive to purge the Confederate flag and monuments to the South’s Civil War luminaries—good and bad—from the remainder of our history and our national story.

No mind.  Mahone’s slaveholder status must be the only consideration.  The good he did after the war for blacks—nearly all ex-slaves—and for his Virginia must be ignored.  That good doesn’t matter. Nor does the good done by those Evil Ones Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, even George Washington—they were slaveholders.  That they birthed a nation dedicated to all men being equal, the concept of self-rule by personally responsible citizens, even the freedom to engage in…purging…our national story just doesn’t matter.  That’s a trivium.

The VA Fails Again

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This time it’s the Marion, IL, Veterans Administration clinic.

In 1971 Kirby Williams went to Vietnam as a US Army draftee and worked as a finance clerk. In 2010 he went to a Veterans Affairs clinic in southern Illinois where a radiologist took a scan of his kidneys.

Unfortunately, the radiologist missed a 2- to 3-centimeter mass in one of his kidneys, and by last December that mass had grown to between 7 and 8 centimeters. Now the 66-year-old has, at most, two to five years to live.

Williams isn’t the only victim.

Within weeks…of starting at the VA [in March of 2016!], he [Dr L Anthony Leskosky, a board-certified radiologist] noticed patients previously diagnosed as healthy had radiology scans from years prior documenting grave conditions. These conditions, such as cancers, aortic aneurysms, bleeding ulcers and obstructions in their small bowel and colon—if left untreated—could cause patients tremendous pain or even premature death.

“In radiology, we compare current scans to old studies, so I was pulling up the last two years of the scans. That’s when I noticed the radiologists had called their previous exams ‘normal,’ but I would see a mass on the older scans, and then on my scan, I would see the mass had enlarged, and in some cases become a spreading cancer. Usually that is not survivable,” Leskosky said.

As many as four to five times a day, Leskosky said, he found serious errors in prior readings….

Leskosky whistleblew on this and too many other such incompetencies, and the VA’s answer was to fire him rather than correct the problem.

That’s damning enough, but read the whole article.

President Donald Trump touts improvements in the VA, and there have been some.  However, they’re too little, too small, and too late, and the VA’s destructiveness continues.  The Veterans Administration must be disbanded and its budget sent to our veterans as vouchers with which they can seek medical care with doctors of their choosing at medical facilities of their choosing.  And get actual treatment.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Was I Right to Pull the Plug on a Nazi Website?

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That’s the title of a tortured op-ed in a recent Wall Street Journal by Matthew Prince, Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare.  Recall that he and his Cloudflare helped kick a group of neo-Nazis off the internet last week, including the Daily Stormer Web site.  He bragged at the time about having done that, and as despicable as neo-Nazi and Nazi wannabe thugs are, that’s an easy brag.

In this op-ed, though, Prince is claiming to be having second thoughts.

However.

As an opponent of free speech, Mr Prince, of course you were right to censor any speech you personally would consider repugnant.  As a biased opponent of free speech, moreover, you’re entirely correct to leave your favored-of-the-Left hate groups—Antifa and BLM, for instance—untouched by your censorship.

But this—this is impressively shabby.

[T]he First Amendment doesn’t compel private companies to let anyone broadcast on their platforms.

No, more than merely shabby.  This is utterly, cynically disingenuous. It’s true in the narrowest, most legalist sense that the First Amendment only limits government’s ability to censor speech. But the principle underlying that Amendment, the individual liberty to speak freely in accordance with one’s own conscience rather than in comportment with a Know Better’s diktat is universal. It’s one of our unalienable Rights…among [which] are…Liberty….

Of course, as the son of a journalist [growing up] with discussions around the dinner table on the importance of freedom of speech, you know this full well.

Your Orwellian missive, with its artificial, bodice-ripping anguish, is at best mendacious.