Gifted with Intelligence, Truth, and Speech Dan Bongino endures Twit, Brain-Drained, BIG with Head and Mouth, Loony G. Rivera!

Geraldo Rivera and Dan Bongino feud reaches a boiling point on ‘Hannity’: ‘You son of a b****!’

GEORGE BACKApril 15, 2021, 1:36 AMScroll back up to restore default view.

Tempers flared on Hannity Wednesday night, as Fox News correspondent-at-large Geraldo Rivera and conservative pundit Dan Bongino got into a heated argument. The chaotic exchange came just two days after the two sparred over the protests stemming from the police shooting of 20-year-old Black man Daunte Wright. The latest argument stemmed from a continuation of Bongino’s assertion that Rivera is creating racial divide with his reporting.

“People like Geraldo continue to pump out a race narrative with no data to back it up at all,” Bongino said, before calling Rivera out. “All you want to do is see the country burn.”

The accusation made Rivera irate. “I want to see the country burn?” Rivera repeated incredulously. “You son of a bitch! I want to see the country burn? You punk! You’re nothing but a punk!”

Wright was shot after a police officer allegedly mistook her gun for a taser. As a former police officer, Bongino also didn’t appreciate Rivera’s suggestion that cops holster their guns on the side of their non-dominant hand. He mocked Rivera saying, “I don’t even know how to respond to that.”

Even though the two personalities often appear on Fox News together, it is evident that they do not see eye to eye. While Rivera tried to make his arguments about understanding the frustrations of protesters, Bongino repeatedly mocked him.

Only LEFTIST, ATHEIST AMERICA COULD “HIRE” KLUTZ BIDEN president!

Biden’s Trillion-Dollar Train Wreck

By JIM GERAGHTY at National Review:

April 28, 2021 9:46 AM

President Joe Biden announces executive actions as Vice President Kamala Harris listens in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., April 8, 2021. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

On the menu today: No, really, you can’t keep track of the Biden administration’s trillion-dollar spending bills without a scorecard — and this administration appears to be whistling past the graveyard on the threat of inflation; there’s some easily overlooked good news on COVID-19 over the past two weeks; another police controversy, this time in California’s Bay area; and looking ahead to Thursday night’s NFL Draft.

What is the Biden presidency? The Biden presidency is . . .

. . . spending $1.9 trillion on the “American Rescue Plan,” commonly described as “the pandemic-relief bill,” so you can move on to . . .

. . . a $2.3 trillion “American Jobs Plan,” commonly described as “the infrastructure bill,” so you can move on to . . .

. . . a $1.8 trillion “American Families Plan,” which hasn’t gotten a nickname yet, but will probably end up being called “the education bill” because it pledges to provide, at minimum, four years of free education . . .

. . . so you can move on to the “Green New Deal for Cities,” which would “provide $1 trillion for struggling municipalities” . . .

. . . so you can move on to a “Green New Deal for Public Housing,” which would spent $180 billion to “retrofit, rehabilitate, and decarbonize the entire nation’s public housing stock,” both of which are separate from . . .

. . . the THRIVE Act, which would spend — excuse me, “invest” — $15 trillion over 15 years to create “family-sustaining, union jobs across the economy,” which is separate from . . .

. . . I guess we would call it the “Green New Deal Classic,” which originally called for eliminating 88 percent of our current energy sources, banning cars, and cutting military spending by at least half.

Got that? Like the old joke about the turtles, it’s massive spending bills, all the way down.

Fact-checkers are quick to emphasize that Biden’s infrastructure plan “is not the Green New Deal.” PolitiFact asked Greenpeace, and Greenpeace emphasized that the two proposals are different, so that settles the issue:

The American Jobs Plan also includes about $480 billion to boost manufacturing and research and development, some of which might boost clean energy. The THRIVE Act folds money for those activities into other line items, primarily its investments in clean energy.

Ryan Schleeter, spokesman for Greenpeace USA, a Green New Deal Network member, said it is misleading to equate Biden’s proposal with the Green New Deal.

“The American Jobs Plan is similar in intent to the THRIVE Act, but far narrower in scope and scale,” Schleeter said.

Good heavens, how could anyone possibly mix up those two massive new spending proposals focused on clean-energy projects? It’s like Dylan McDermott and Dermot Mulroney. They’re completely different.

Just in those first three Mad Libs bills listed up there — “The American [Noun] Plan” — Biden wants to spend an additional $6 trillion beyond what the federal government would ordinarily spend. That’s about a third of the entire U.S. economy, all on top of the $4.4 trillion the government spent in 2019, the last non-pandemic year.

I don’t know if we’re about to endure a sudden and lasting surge in inflation; the Capital Matters guys can sort that out better than I can. I do know that the Consumer Price Index had its biggest jump in about a decade last month, and the overall price index is up 2.6 percent from a year earlier. In the past month, gas prices are higher, natural gas and energy costs are higher, and food prices are higher, both at home and in restaurants. You may have noticed that suppliers are scrambling to find lumber and semiconductor chips. It sure feels like inflation is making a comeback.

Mark May 12 on your calendar; that’s when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics offers its next round of updated numbers. Two consecutive months of dramatic jumps in the consumer price index would suggest this wasn’t a brief, pandemic-influenced fluke.

One condition that can cause inflation is “too many dollars chasing too many goods” — “when the aggregate demand in an economy strongly outweighs the aggregate supply, prices go up.” If the government starts running the printing presses and throwing around money willy-nilly, but the supply of goods doesn’t keep pace, prices go up. Yes, you’ve got more money in your bank account or wallet, but so does everyone else. Prices go up, so the additional money you’ve received doesn’t help you as much.

Psst: We’re Winning the Battle against COVID-19.

Daily new COVID cases reported in the U.S. two weeks ago: 78,924.

Seven-day average of new cases reported in the U.S. as of two weeks ago: 72,809.

New COVID-19 cases reported in the U.S. as of yesterday: 52,046.

Seven-day average of new cases reported in the U.S. as of yesterday: 57,024.

Decline in the number of cases from two weeks ago: 34 percent.

Decline in the seven-day average of new cases from two weeks ago: 21.6 percent.

Here We Go Again

The New York Times: “California Man Dies After Officers Pin Him to Ground for 5 Minutes”

Within the article itself:

After about four and a half minutes of body camera footage showing [Mario Arenales Gonzalez] pinned to the ground, a third officer is seen on his legs. When one officer asks if they should roll him on his side, another replies, “I don’t want to lose what I got.”

“We have no weight on his chest, nothing,” the second officer observes, pointing to Mr. Gonzalez’s back. As the first officer tries to adjust his position, the second says: “No, no, no. No weight, no weight, no weight.”

Seconds later, the officers notice that Mr. Gonzalez has become unresponsive. They roll him onto his side and then push him onto his back and begin chest compressions after checking for a pulse.

After emergency medical workers respond, the first officer explains that they administered Narcan, which can reverse overdoses. “He went from combative to nonresponsive almost immediately,” he says.

That sounds pretty darn different from the circumstances of George Floyd’s killing. From the description, the officers, or at least one officer, deliberately avoided putting pressure on his chest. They apparently quickly recognized he was unresponsive and set about attempting to keep him alive once they realized he was unresponsive. Gonzalez was taken to a hospital and died there.

And yet . . . “Everything we saw in that video was unnecessary and unprofessional,” Mario Gonzalez’s brother Gerardo Gonzalez said Tuesday during a news conference. “The police killed my brother in the same manner that they killed George Floyd.”

ADDENDUM: I realize that if you draw a Venn Diagram of readers of this newsletter and New York Jets fans, there’s not a ton of overlap, but there’s some; over at Play Like a Jet, I look through the Jets’ options with their second pick in the first round. The Jets’ first pick in the first round is almost certainly going to be Brigham Young University quarterback Zach Wilson, who looks like the absolute best, most talented, rocket-armed, and most naturally leading sixth-grader the Jets could possibly picked. There is a claim that Wilson is 21 years old, but come on, just look at him. Never mind buying beer without ID; most movie theaters wouldn’t allow Zach Wilson to watch an R-rated movie without his parents. When he walks into a restaurant, the waiter must just instinctively gives him the kids’ menu. He looks like he had his last birthday at Chuck E. Cheese.

CCP, MSNBC, CNN, PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS, AND FRIENDS ALSO RESTRICT FREE SPEECH…so what’s the difference?

CCP launches new app to restrict free speech

By Eric Utter at American Thinker:

China’s communist government has launched a new app that urges citizens to report anyone expressing “mistaken opinions” on the internet.  The new platform will also target anyone who criticizes the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), disputes the official CCP version of the country’s history, or traffics in “misinformation.”

The new website and app were recently unveiled by an arm of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), and authorities called on users to play an “active role” in helping to identify “malicious people distorting facts and confusing” others.  CCP authorities stated: “We hope that most internet users will play an active role in supervising society … and enthusiastically report harmful information,” adding that they strongly “encouraged” netizens to report fellow internet users who have the audacity to spread “mistaken opinions” online in order to create a “good public opinion atmosphere.”  Particularly egregious offenses would apparently include “distorting” the party’s history, attacking its leadership and policies, and “denying the excellence of advanced socialist culture.”

Thought uniformity is an old concept in China.  CC BY-NC 2.0 license.

This new app is in addition to and augments China’s existing oppressive social credit score system that bans people from traveling and engaging in other basic societal activities and functions if they commit even minor “infractions” such as jaywalking or buying too much junk food.

“Mistaken opinions”?  Particularly astute readers of this post will note that this is the third time I have used that term, two of which I’ve hyperlinked.  The reason should be obvious.  “Opinions” are just that.  Two plus two does equal four, regardless of what modern espousers of Critical Race Theory may say, but opinions are, by definition, not immutable truths.  That is why they are termed “opinions.”  Yet the CCP, in using the term “mistaken opinions,” is clearly if obliquely asserting that its opinions are facts and those of anyone dissenting from them are false, untrue, lies…calumnious.

This may seem extreme and an attack on cherished God-given freedoms to some in the United States — or the West in general, but is it really at all different from how Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Instagram, et al. police their platforms?  Or how social media mobs in the West currently conduct preposterously biased witch hunts that often lead to people being ostracized, de-platformed, and unemployed, simply for expressing “mistaken opinions“?  Is this really at all different from what CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Hollywood, Big Academia, Big Tech, and the hyper-craven-cum-hyper-woke CEOs of giant multinational corporations are engaging in?  It is certainly akin to the actions and policies the Biden administration — and the majority of Democratic leaders and governors mayors — have advocated, embarked on, and instituted.  

So wear your mask and stay socially distant, Westerners.  Get vaccinated pronto.  Don’t forget to use the pronouns of others’ choice!  Don’t question your betters’ leadership, actions, or agenda!  Experts know best!  The science is settled!

And always remember, the elites are only doing what they think is best for you!  Don’t question that.  Or they’ll have no choice but to punish you.  For your own good, of course.

By the way, have you jaywalked lately?  Denied the excellence of advanced socialist culture as portrayed by the Squad?  Purchased too many bags of Cheetos and potato chips?

Don’t plan on traveling anytime soon.

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Low-Life Son of Low-Life President LEAD THE AMERICA OF OUR LOW-LIFE DEMS

Hunter Biden to guest-lecture a ‘fake news’ media course at Tulane University

By Monica Showalter at American Thinker:

Hunter Biden, once again, seems to back at it, living off old dad’s name.

He’s been invited to “guest lecture” a “fake news” 10-week media course at Tulane University in New Orleans. He’ll be one of a panel of very well-known left-wing names, plus #NeverTrump New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.

According to the Daily Mail:

Hunter Biden is helping teach a class on fake news at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana this fall.

The course titled ‘Media Polarization and Public Policy Impacts’ will include several guest speakers throughout its 10 weeks, including the president’s son.

The course description, according to a copy of the syllabus obtained by DailyMail.com, says: ‘America’s rapidly advancing partisan divide is fueled substantially by the growing political polarization increasingly evident in our news media.’

The university didn’t say whether he would be paid, but it would be surprising if he wasn’t offered at least an honorarium. Getting big names such as former White House COVID response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, Fox News’s Juan Williams, Susan Glasser of the New Yorker, Kylie Atwood of CNN, Margaret Brennan of CBS, Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post and a couple of others, plus Stephens, all together at once is no small thing, and doesn’t sound like a free gig courtesy of the speakers. At many universities, these honorariums and guest-salaries can get pretty big. Angela Davis, for one, was paid $43,000 for a one-day a week, few-weeks’ course at UCLA in 2014. How much was Hunter paid? If it was little or nothing for Hunter, it’s likely the university would have said in its statement to the Daily Mail.

Nice work if you can get it.

In the three main news accounts noted — from the Daily Mail, which broke the story, to the New York Post, to Breitbart News, all noted that he wasn’t exactly a guy with media experience. He had no experience writing articles or columns for newspapers, nor any broadcast experience. What he has a knack for is glomming off the fame of his dear old dad, whether as an ‘artist’ getting a fancy gallery gig, a writer, getting a big-dollar book gig, a Navy man, somehow getting into the Navy as an officer despite his drug use and advanced age, or a money-man, with gigs on the boards of skeezy foreign firms, in China and Ukraine, and possibly some other places. Somehow, Hunter always manages to enter fields with instant paydays on subjects he knows nothing about. Doesn’t matter what.

Which rather contradicts Old Joe’s promise that none of his family members would be profiting off his presidential name. Well, well, well.

The question that remains is why Tulane, a university that spends about a billion a year on its operation, good reputation, would want to do this. Would it be another personal-political favor to impress Old Joe?

Research grants and federal funding might be one place to look, for that. Tulane, it turns out, gets a lot of federal funding, based on some outdated but likely indicative documents I found from Tulane’s own brochures. 

As of 2008, Tulane got $89 million from the National Institutes for Health, and $39 million from other federal sources, see page 40. The numbers have creeped up bigger, based on individual grants examined since, but I don’t have a full total for now. The university’s endowment, though, is big — at $1.445 billion, based on its latest 2020 annual report. Big and getting bigger every year, as the dramatic charts show.

So yes, they’ve got a lot of federal money, lots of cash for salaries and honorariums, and an interest in pleasing old Joe.

The professors doing the course (Daily Mail seems to have erred in calling Hunter a professor, he’s a guest speaker) are well worth noting, too.

Who are they? One is Dr. Mitchel Sellers, who is listed as a visiting assistant professor, which is about as low as the status goes in professor world, and he looks very young, based on his picture. He is, however, an expert in wokester studies. His bio says this:

Dr. Sellers’ research interests fall broadly into the field of state politics and policies, in addition to civil rights policy broadly defined (race, gender and LGBTQ concerns). He specializes in American politics, research design, statistics, and public policy. His research on policy diffusion, executive orders and transgender rights has appeared in several scholarly outlets, including Political Research Quarterly, Journal of Public Policy, Administration & Society, and was a with author for The Remarkable Rise of Transgender Rights (University of Michigan Press, 2018).

Not exactly a media expert, any more than Hunter is, but certainly in tune with the wokesterism of the Biden administration. He’d fit in. He’d also benefit from a job with them if he wanted one. Doing a favor with Hunter? The possibility exists.

The second professor is more interesting: He’s not a “Dr.” with a Ph.D but he’s got a lot of political connections. His day job is working as the chief of communications for the very large Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, after a decent career in broadcast journalism. And politics, lots of Washington politics. He knows the politicians and the press as only a swamp creature could. His bio reads:

As a print journalist, Schwartz has written for the Washington Post, OffBeat, the definitive guide to New Orleans music, and various national newspapers and magazines. Early in his career, he served as a research assistant to former Carter domestic policy adviser Stuart E. Eizenstat at Powell, Goldstein, Frazer, and Murphy and as a legislative fellow in the offices of Senator J. Bennett Johnston (D-LA) and Representative Lindy Boggs (D-LA). 

As a P.R. man, his job is making political and media connections. And he’s knee deep in establishment politics, it would not be surprising if he knew all of those guest speakers and invited them on. Would he, with his leftwing politics, have an interest in pleasing Old Joe by giving Hunter a speaker gig, probably with big money? It’s hard not to ask that question.

As for Hunter himself, why would he be interested in doing this? Reliving all the true reports about his debauchery, supposedly left behind now? He was never a victim of fake news as President Trump was. He was actually the beneficiary of social media censorship of real news about him, as the New York Post, noted. They are the ones who know about fake news — they got censored by Big Tech for its genuinely accurate reporting.

The usual reason for Hunter’s branching out into fields he knows nothing about is money, so it’s possible it was that.

It may also be a bid to shill his books, which seems to have quite weak sales based on Amazon rankings, despite his hefty book advance. I wrote about that here.

Lastly, it may be a bid to respectable-ize himself, clean up his drugs-and-hookers reputation, by suddenly reinventing himself as a respected professor, same as domestic terrorist Bill Ayers once did.

According to Breitbart News:

Hunter also made a failed attempt to get a law professor gig at the University of California Los Angeles, touting his family name and political connections, emails reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation revealed.

In 2019, Hunter reportedly offered to teach a class on drug policy and identified a list of possible guest speakers with close ties to his father.

That gig never panned out.

One thing in common with all these things is that they appear to involve influence-peddling off dear old dad. Were he just a basic crack addict, would the university have chosen him to be its guest speaker? He hasn’t even come clean on his abandoned computer full of crack-smoking pictures, which was obviously his, while some watchers of addicts, such as New York Post columnist Maureen Callahan, don’t think he’s acting like someone who has really kicked drugs and become a changed man.

He’s just same old Hunter, living off dad’s name, and spreading potential corruption with everyone he comes in contact with.

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of cropped images by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0, Acaben, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 2.0, PxFuel public domain, ABC News YouTube screen shot, and Voice of America // public domain

Joy Reid Loves to Brag About and Sell Her Own Stupidity!

Joy Reid: I don’t know about you but I wore two masks when I went jogging today

ALLAHPUNDIT Apr 28, 2021 at HotAir:

Running outdoors with members of your household (or by yourself, of course) was one of only two activities listed in the CDC’s new guidance yesterday that can be done without a mask *even if you’re unvaccinated.* Reid isn’t. She’s had both shots. The odds of her either getting infected or infecting someone else during the course of a jog must be one in many millions.

But this isn’t about science anymore, is it?

It’s pure “I care more than you” virtue-signaling nonsense. Anyone can wear a mask in a risky environment, the thinking goes, but the person who wears a mask in an environment where the risk is near zero? Why, that’s a person who’s really considerate of those around them, or so Reid wants us to believe. Watch, then read on.https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1387194954192142340&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fhotair.com%2Fallahpundit%2F2021%2F04%2F28%2Fjoy-reid-i-dont-know-about-you-but-i-wore-two-masks-when-i-went-jogging-today-n386438&sessionId=995057c4bb10922f6198a35c8057ecbab484b355&siteScreenName=hotairblog&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px

That isn’t the first time she’s broadcast her extreme risk-aversion to her audience. From a few weeks ago:https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-1&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfX0%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1381255429951479813&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fhotair.com%2Fallahpundit%2F2021%2F04%2F28%2Fjoy-reid-i-dont-know-about-you-but-i-wore-two-masks-when-i-went-jogging-today-n386438&sessionId=995057c4bb10922f6198a35c8057ecbab484b355&siteScreenName=hotairblog&theme=light&widgetsVersion=82e1070%3A1619632193066&width=550px

Even for a virtue-signaler, that’s a lot of signaling — or at least I hope that’s what she’s up to. If she’s genuinely still so terrified of COVID post-vaccination that she won’t do anything indoors, even with the CDC’s endorsement, I pity her. At that point it’s not risk-aversion anymore, it’s paranoia. And borderline anti-vax.

Whatever, though. If she wants to double-mask outdoors after being immunized, it’s no one else’s business. Besides, in due time peer pressure will lead her to change her mind. The fewer masks are being worn outside by others, the more mask-clingers will begin to feel “overdressed” among them.

While Reid was boasting to her viewers last night about her insistence on continued precautions, actual scientists were complaining to other media outlets that the CDC’s new rules are too restrictive.

“It doesn’t go far enough,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner, professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University, told CNN on Tuesday night. “What it doesn’t really underscore for Americans is what the CDC knows, which is that these vaccines induce immunity.”…

“If you tell people that you can do just about anything if you are vaccinated, that is telling people that you have confidence in the vaccines,” Reiner said. “But what’s the message to the country when you tell people who are fully vaccinated ‘Be wary of crowded locations?’ You’re casting doubt on the efficacy of the vaccine. And I don’t think there is any doubt on the efficacy of these vaccines.”

Leana Wen also pushed some hard truths on CNN:

“I understand that the Biden team wants to be cautious, but caution comes at a price,” Wen said earlier in the interview…

“I think they’re discounting that many Americans want to know, what’s in it for me? They don’t want to wait until everyone gets to some elusive herd immunity,” Wen continued.

“I think it will be a lot more effective if we say once you are fully vaccinated, that’s the end of the road for you,” she added. “So at that point, you’re able to take off your mask outside. You’re able to go about enjoying many aspects of pre-pandemic life. I think that is going to be key to overcoming vaccine hesitancy.”

The new guidance *did* do that, though — sort of. All activities, indoor and outdoor, were endorsed as low risk for vaccinated people. The only hitch was that mask-wearing is still recommended indoors in public spaces. “The CDC’s mask guidance is really vaccine guidance,” Axios noted this morning, correctly, emphasizing how the new rules incentivize vaccination as the chief means of risk management. We’re no longer arguing about whether any public space should be off-limits to the vaccinated for precautionary reasons, which is progress. The argument is whether they should continue to take any precautions while within those spaces, even a minimal one like wearing a mask.
I’ll leave you with Scott Gottlieb, another critic of the new guidance. It’s a good step, he allows, but having 14 different categories with different rules for the vaccinated and unvaccinated is waaaay too complex for the average joe. I sense that Gottlieb would have preferred to see the agency say “anything goes” for the vaccinated while focusing its rules on those who haven’t had their shots yet. He even goes so far as to suggest that businesses set their own guidance for indoor spaces rather than rely on the CDC because the agency’s rules are too baroque and take too long to be issued. When even a respected expert like Gottlieb is telling people to ignore the CDC, it feels like we’re at a bad place in America’s pandemic response.

Savagery from the Islamic World!

Islamic State Cites ‘Grievances,’ Claims Victimhood against Murdered Christians

By Raymond Ibrahim at American Thinker:

The Islamic State in Sinai recently executed another Christian on video.  In a clip recorded before the execution, the slain Copt, Nabil H. Salama, 62, “confessed” to his crime: building the only church in Bir al-Abd in Sinai — a church that was supposedly “cooperating with the Egyptian army’s and intelligence’s war on the Islamic State.” 

Although Salama offered this “confession” only after being tortured — after his front teeth were busted out of his mouth — the charge that Coptic churches are actively and nefariously working to undermine the Islamic order is as widespread among Egypt’s Islamists as it is constantly morphing in absurd directions. 

Thus, in an unrestrained tirade back in 2010, Muhammad Salim al-Awwa, former secretary-general of the International Union for Muslim Scholars, appeared on Al-Jazeera and accused the Copts, not of “cooperating” with the Egyptian military, but of “stocking arms and ammunitions in their churches and monasteries” — imported from Israel no less, “the heart of the Coptic Cause” — and “preparing to wage war against Muslims.”  He warned that if nothing is done, the “country will burn” and incited Muslims to “counteract the strength of the [Coptic] Church.”

In reality, all that ever “burns” are Coptic churches at the hands of Muslims — as when nearly 70 churches were attacked and many destroyed following the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muhammad Morsi.  This is to say nothing of all the Coptic churches that have been bombed, leaving scores of Christian worshipers dead, by terrorists.  To name just some of the more notable incidents: On Palm Sunday, 2017, two Coptic churches were bombed and 50 worshipers killed; on Sunday, December 11, 2016, a Coptic church was bombed and at least 27 worshipers killed; on New Year’s Eve of 2011, another church was bombed and about 23 Christians killed; and on Christmas Eve of 2010, seven Christians were shot dead while leaving their church.

The fact is, Muslim terrorists are notorious for offering any number of pretexts — many of which border on the absurd — to justify their cowardly targeting and murdering of Christians, in and out of Egypt.  The Islamic State cited “grievances” to justify its grisly slaughter of 21 Christians — 20 Copts and one Ghanaian — on the shores of Libya in 2015.  An article in Dabiq, the Islamic State’s online magazine in English, titled “Revenge for the Muslimat [Muslim women] Persecuted by the Coptic Crusaders of Egypt,” claimed that the 21 Christians were slaughtered in “revenge” for two Coptic women who, back in 2010 and according to Islamic propaganda, were compelled by Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church to recant their conversion to Islam and return to Christianity.

Indeed, the late Coptic pope Shenouda III, who was then nearly 90 years old and immobile, was portrayed as “a U.S. agent, an abductor and torturer of female Muslim converts from Christianity, who was stockpiling weapons in monasteries and churches with a view to waging war against the Muslims and dividing Egypt to create a Coptic State.”

The Islamic State also cited the 2010 bombing of Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad as a product of “revenge” for those same supposedly forced-to-reconvert-back-to-Christianity women in Egypt.  Then, armed jihadis had stormed the Iraqi church during worship service and opened fire indiscriminately before detonating their suicide vests, which were “filled with ball bearings to kill as many people as possible.”  Nearly 60 Christians — including women, children, and even babies (pictures of aftermath here) — were slaughtered.

Nor is this blame-the-victim strategy limited to Egypt.  Speaking two days after a series of bombings rocked Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, 2017, killing 359 people, a junior defense minister said that the attack “was in retaliation for the attack against Muslims in Christchurch,” where a New Zealand man killed around 50 Muslims in two mosques.  

Two points give the lie to all such claims of Islamic “retaliation” due to “grievances”: 

First, what did the Iraqi Christians of Our Lady Church, or the one decapitated Ghanaian, have to do with the imagined crimes of the Coptic Church?  For that matter, what do Christians in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia have to do with the secular West?  Whenever the latter somehow offends Muslims — whether by publishing cartoons or launching military operations in Afghanistan — Muslims “respond” by terrorizing the Christian minorities in their midst.

What exactly do brown Sri Lankan Christians celebrating Easter have to do with a white terrorist in New Zealand?  Moreover, if the Easter attack was a form of retaliation, what explains the fact that Muslims bomb churches on virtually every Easter (most recently in Indonesia).

This leads to the second point: since when did Islamic terrorists who regularly preach hate for the other ever need a reason or excuse to make the lives of non-Muslims, chief among them Christians, miserable?  For instance, since July 2011, I have been compiling monthly “Muslim Persecution of Christians” reports (published by Gatestone Institute).  In virtually every one of these monthly reports, Muslims bomb, burn, or ban churches and generally terrorize Christians.  Are we seriously to believe that this is all due to Muslim “grievances” against the disempowered Christian minorities in their midst?

Indeed, even in the most recent murder, that of Nabil Salama the Copt in Sinai, his murderers, perhaps inadvertently, let escape the truth behind their animus.  In his execution video, Salama appears on his knees, with three men holding rifles standing behind him. The one in the middle launches into a typical jihadi diatribe: “All praise to Allah, who ordered his slaves [Muslims] to fight and who assigned humiliation onto the infidels” — this latter part is said while the terrorist contemptuously points at the bound and kneeling man before him — “until they pay the jizya while feeling utterly subdued.”

This is a paraphrase of Koran 9:29, which commands Muslims to wage jihad against the “People of the Book — Christians and Jews — until they pay tribute and feel themselves utterly subdued.”  Note: The Koran does not cite any grievances against Christians and Jews — except for the fact that they are Christians and Jews, infidels, who reject the authority of Muhammad and are therefore the enemy.

In short, all “grievances” cited by those Muslims who terrorize already disenfranchised religious minorities in their midst are false and meant to “legitimize” their otherwise cowardly and atrocious deeds.

Raymond Ibrahim, author of Sword and Scimitar, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.

The Revolution of America’s Fascist Dems IN ACTION!

I wonder why Louisville can’t find enough cops?

JAZZ SHAW Apr 28, 2021 at HotAir:

AP Photo/John Minchillo

In the nearly one year that has passed since the “summer of love” kicked off in 2020, the Metropolitan Police Department in Louisville, Kentucky has taken a beating, both literally and figuratively. The sustained protests and riots surrounding the shooting of Breonna Taylor have featured attacks on officers, police vehicles and precinct buildings. Two officers were shot during an ambush attack last September, though both of them thankfully survived. And the cops haven’t exactly been receiving much vocal support from City Hall (to put it mildly). This situation has led a number of uniformed officers to take early retirement or simply quit to go look for work elsewhere. The number of cops leaving the force has reached the point where the LMPD is now short of its required staffing levels by hundreds of officers and they aren’t finding enough qualified applicants to replace them. (Fox News)

Nearly 190 cops left the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) in 2020 and 43 have stepped away from the Kentucky city’s agency so far in 2021, either choosing to retire or resign altogether, as law enforcement officials struggle to recruit new members to make up for a deficit in manpower, authorities and a union spokesperson told Fox News on Tuesday.

“I would say that we’re in dire straits,” said River City Fraternal Order of Police press secretary Dave Mutchler, speaking to the current condition of LMPD staffing. Mutchler also serves as a spokesperson for the Louisville Metro Officer Union.

Statistics provided by LMPD on Tuesday show the department has hired 26 new members so far this year, while 43 have left. The 1,069-person department falls 255 people short of its “authorized strength” of 1,324 — the number of personnel it is authorized to employ, statistics show.

The LMPD did manage to hire 104 new officers last year (somehow) but that was far short of the 188 they lost to early retirement or resignations. Thus far in 2021 they have hired 26 while 43 more have hit the bricks. The local FOP press secretary described the current force levels as “critically low.”

As he went on to point out, “those who would break the law” have been paying attention to these headlines. Violent crime and murder rates are “through the roof” in 2021, and the vast majority of those crimes were not directly associated with the protests. The bad guys are aware that the police are stretched very thin right now and response times to reported crimes are increasing, making life a bit easier for gang members.

Shootings in Louisville are currently up 84% compared to the same period last year. Arson is similarly on the rise, with many of the targets being government buildings and police stations. The city is also frequently plagued with the same sort of vandalism being seen in other large, metropolitan areas, with graffiti showing up encouraging people to “kill the cops.”

Is it any wonder that morale is low on the police force and officers are leaving in droves? It probably didn’t help matters when municipal officials came out this week saying they “fully support” an investigation being launched by Merrick Garland into the practices used by the LMPD. The police in Louisville are being physically attacked in the streets and verbally assaulted by the city government. Perhaps the most amazing part of this story is the fact that they managed to find 26 people willing to put on a police uniform this year.

This situation is quite simply unsustainable. Once the force falls below the critical mass of officers needed to maintain day-to-day patrols and routine functions, Louisville will start turning into the wild west. They can draw on the county Sheriff’s Department and the State Troopers to bolster their ranks for a while, but that’s only going to be possible for a limited amount of time. Beyond that, you can expect to see criminal activity on par with what Baltimore regularly experiences and possibly some vigilante activity by residents who realize that the system is imploding and they are no longer being kept safe.

Some Feelings about Our Today’s Fascist Dem Rioting

Daily Caller: People in Brooklyn Center feel differently about riots and looting than people in DC

JOHN SEXTON at Hot Air:…. Apr 27, 2021

A simple post to close out a long Tuesday. Yesterday the Daily Caller published a series of man-on-the-street interviews. The gimmick here is that their reporter was speaking to people in two different locations. The first was Brooklyn Center where police officer Kim Potter shot Daunte Wright. The other was Washington, DC.

As you’ll see, there’s a very different response in the two locations. The respondents closest to the “unrest” aren’t very tolerant of the idea that riots and looting are acceptable forms of protest. In fact, they suggest the people who are doing those things are outside agitators and opportunists. Meanwhile, the folks who answered in DC repeatedly defend rioting as the last means of expressions for groups trying to make a point.

The subtext here is that most of the respondents in Brooklyn Center, the ones who aren’t rioting fans, are black. “When something like this goes on the opportunistic people come out and they try to dehumanize this,” a man wearing a “veteran” cap said.

Meanwhile, most of the respondents in DC, the ones defending riots, are white women. “I mean, I think that all violence is bad violence but in the case when systems aren’t responding to any other forms of change, I can understand people getting frustrated to the point that they need to take other avenues,” one woman said.

I don’t know if they’ve left a few examples to the contrary on the cutting room floor but there’s clearly a pattern which seems believable. Riots and looting in your own neighborhood is different from the idea of riots and looting somewhere else.

How Screwball Are Today’s Generation Alpha Fems With Their “THEYBIES”?

The Gender Non-Reveal: How Gender-Neutral Parenting Harms Kids

By Danielle Greene at American Thinker:

The newest generation, the children of Millennials, has been dubbed Generation Alpha — and they’re coming up fast.  What ideas are they bringing with them?  For starters, they are “estimated to be the most gender-fluid and anti-sexist generation yet,” according to gender studies professor Dr. Kyl Myers.

Myers and her husband, Brent, represent a small but growing group of parents who are seeking to hasten this upcoming “gender revolution” by raising their own kids as gender-neutral.  Their child, Zoomer, is an example of what some are calling theybies — a combination of “they” and “babies,” referring to children whose parents refuse to tell them what their sex is.  Myers explains, “We had seen [our child’s] genitals during the anatomy scan.  But we didn’t think that information told us anything about our kid’s gender.”  In fact, she has informed Zoomer that “some girls have penises and some boys have vulvas.” 

But is it possible for a child to grow up with a solid identity without knowing his or her gender?  Will our children benefit from a gender revolution that completely disassociates their bodies from their identity?

A Facebook group for parents like Myers is called “Parenting Theybies.”  The group’s rules make the radical declaration that “there is no such thing as biological sex.”  Group administrators argue that “while people have bodies, chromosomes, and genitals, calling this ‘sex’ is a social construction rather than a biological fact.”  The rules further warn that any posts referring to biological sex will be flagged.  Apparently, science doesn’t fit the narrative.

Myers has authored a controversial book, Raising Them: Our Adventure in Gender Creative Parenting, in which she says she wants Zoomer to “explore the sex and gender spectrums, try on different identities, and self-determine what ‘fits.’”  But can identity be tried on and taken off like clothing?  Can children mix and match sexes and genders as though sorting through a pile of socks? 

Myers devoted an entire blog just to “gender creative hair,” featuring kids with dyed locks of all colors.  Her goal, she says, is for kids to feel “empowered to smash the stereotypes and the haters.”  After all, “hairstyle is an important part of someone’s identity.”  But biology or anatomy?  Not so much, it seems.

Around age 4, Zoomer began to indicate a preference for he/him pronouns.  But Myers is quick to “remind folks that sharing [Zoomer’s] pronouns doesn’t give any information about his reproductive anatomy.”  Then what is the purpose of pronouns anyway?

Another couple, Nate and Julia Sharpe, are raising their fraternal twins, Zyler and Kadyn, as theybies as well.  The couple told NBC News that, during the delivery, they asked the hospital staff not to announce the sex of their twins.  In fact, because the babies were wrapped in blankets, the parents themselves did not even discover the twins’ sex for several hours after their birth.  As Julia put it, “It just wasn’t something that was interesting… It was all about meeting the children and interacting with them.”

The Sharpes have not revealed the twins’ biological sex to anyone who doesn’t strictly need to know (like doctors or daycare workers).  Julia notes that some people “got really, really frustrated that we wouldn’t tell them what [the twins’] genitalia was, which is kind of a weird thing when you think about it.”  By age three, Zyler and Kadyn were certainly aware of their physical anatomy, but they had not been taught that those body parts are in any way associated with their gender.  Parents of theybies insist that their children will reveal their gender identities on their own at some point, typically around preschool age.

Let’s acknowledge that parents of theybies often have good intentions.  They seek to avoid what they perceive as the negative effects of gender disparities on their children.  It appears that they have a sincere desire to help their children establish a strong sense of self.  But can a young child develop a robust identity while simultaneously being taught to ignore their own body?  Does the child’s body contribute nothing to their gender identity? 

Try as they might to give their children a firm foundation for their identity, these parents’ genderless approach actually accomplishes the opposite.  It inevitably causes children to grow up with a fractured view of their own identity.  Theybies learn that their bodies are not an essential part of who they are as a person; that the biological and anatomical realities they can see with their own eyes are not necessarily to be trusted but are secondary to their feelings.  But if anatomy is irrelevant, what is a boy?  What is a girl?

How can children like Zoomer or Zyler or Kadyn determine if they are a boy or girl unless their parents give them an understanding of those terms?  If a child prefers playing with dolls, princesses, and all things pink, does that make the child a girl?  Does a preference for rough-and-tumble play define a boy?  Those kinds of gender stereotypes are exactly what parents of theybies say they are anxious to avoid.

But without the biological definitions of boy and girl, all that remains are gender stereotypes and clichés.  The natural result is that parents resort to circular reasoning: “A boy is a person who feels like a boy on the inside.”  Is that helpful to children trying to understand their own gender identity?  Suppose I made up a word, blork.  If I told you, “A blork is a person who feels like a blork on the inside,” does that help you understand the meaning of the word blork?

The truth of the matter is that biological sex does determine gender identity.  Sexual neuroscientist Debra W. Soh argues that “it’s futile to treat children as blank slates with no predetermined characteristics.  Biology matters.”  As humans, our physical bodies are an essential part of who we are.  Body and person exist as a unified whole.  We express a profound disrespect for our bodies when we deny their fundamental role in shaping our identity.  Such thinking sets children up to be at odds with their own bodies. 

As parents, our most essential responsibility is to help our children form a framework for understanding their world.  We very much build and contextualize our children’s sense of reality.  To strip children of their gender identity is to take from them a key element in understanding themselves and others.

Our children deserve the opportunity to develop a holistic view of their identity that incorporates their physical body and their inner person.  As parents, we must maintain that their gender corresponds with their biological sex, even if their preferences and habits do not conform to cultural gender stereotypes. 

By raising their children as genderless theybies, parents teach them to denigrate and even deny their own bodies.  As a result, these parents actually deprive their children of the very thing they are trying so hard to give them — a strong and enduring sense of personal identity.

Danielle Greene is a mathematics teacher and is currently pursuing a master’s degree at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Today’s American Fems Are Being Made Butch in EGO and STYLE at SCHOOLING!

What’s really behind our slowest population growth since the great depression?

JAZZ SHAW  at HotAir:

(Paul Zalewski via AP)

The initial numbers from the 2020 census were released recently and they contain several oddities. Most of the focus is currently being placed on which states are gaining or losing congressional seats, as you might expect from a media cohort that focuses strongly on politics and policy. In those terms, we’ve already seen the projections. Some notable blue states will be losing a seat while some southern and western red states will benefit. Those shifts primarily indicate the migration of people away from expensive areas and toward more hospitable climes perceived to have greater opportunities and frequently better weather. But underneath all of the political churning in the census data was a rather disturbing fact. The population of the United States grew over the past ten years, but it was the slowest rate of growth seen in all but one decade of the nation’s history. Why? (Associated Press)

The nation’s political center of gravity shifted further to the Republican-led South and West on Monday, with Texas, Florida and other Sun Belt states gaining congressional seats while chillier climes like New York and Ohio lost them.

Altogether, the U.S. population rose to 331,449,281, the Census Bureau said, a 7.4 increase that was the second-slowest ever.

The new allocation of congressional seats came in the U.S. Census Bureau’s first release of data from a 2020 headcount. The numbers chart familiar American migration patterns, and confirm one historic marker: For the first time in 170 years of statehood, California is losing a congressional seat

So we experienced a population growth rate of 7.4% over the past decade. That’s the slowest rate of growth since the 1930s. This didn’t happen all at once, however. Our growth rate began slowing with the census of 2000 and that trend appears to be continuing. So what’s causing the slowdown?

A report from the Brookings Institute at the end of last year attempted to identify the primary factors. To say that the answer is “complicated” is an understatement. The decline in population growth in the year 2020 was significant, so it probably dragged down the numbers for the entire decade a bit.

2020 was easy enough to explain. As with everything else awful in the world today, you can blame the pandemic. Mortality rates were up. Families were holding off on having children in many cases, unsure of what sort of world they would be bringing them into. And at the same time, immigration into the country was down because of travel restrictions. All of those factors added up to a big decrease in the number of new Americans to be counted.

But that’s only one year out of ten, so we can’t blame the virus for all of this. Other factors are in play here. One significant one is that life expectancies in the United States, while still increasing, are increasing more slowly. In the past, when the average life expectancy was rising more dramatically, far fewer elderly people were dying, offering less of a counterbalance to the number of new babies being born and immigrants moving to our country. As the average life expectancy comes closer to stabilizing, that effect is reduced.

We’re also having fewer babies than in past decades. You can blame any number of factors on that data point. Working families engaged in family planning are choosing smaller families in favor of the ability to keep working and achieving economic success. Marriage rates have continued to dip while the average age when people get married has risen. (There was an admirable dip in the divorce rate too, for whatever that’s worth.) People starting families later in life tend to have fewer children.

One other factor to keep an eye on is a bit harder to quantify, but it’s an issue that’s projected to continue to plague us into the foreseeable future. Fertility rates in the United States have been dropping rapidly and that trend is being seen all over the world. Current projections suggest that a majority of countries will see their birth rates fall below the replacement rate in coming decades and by the end of this century, those countries will probably experience negative net population growth numbers.

Add all of this together and you see a picture of a nation and a world where the growth in human population is heading for a plateau. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing in the long run I leave up to the sensibilities of the reader.