Trump’s Rearranging Foreign Affairs

Trump’s High-Wire Act of Reestablishing Deterrence without War

by Victor Davis Hanson at National Review:

Trump’s opponents at home and abroad would love to see him get the U.S. into a messy intervention right before the election.

Donald Trump inherited a superficially stable world from Barack Obama that, in fact, was quite volatile. There had been no tense standoffs with North Korea, but also apparent intercontinental ballistic missiles with possible nuclear warheads now pointed at the United States. Obama more or less punted on North Korea, by declaring it a problem — and hoping that Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear testing did not get too out of hand before 2017.

Then there was the “Iran deal.” It was an appeasing agreement that almost surely guaranteed that Iran would soon have nuclear weapons, along with a revived economy liberated from sanctions and empowered with American cash. Iran’s terrorist surrogates were the greatest beneficiaries of U.S. naïveté. At best, Obama assumed that when Iran went nuclear, it would be on someone else’s presidential watch and therefore not his fault. At worst, Obama, in delusional fashion, believed that empowering Iran would balance Sunni states and bring justice to historically oppressed Shiite and Persian minorities who would take their rightful place in the Islamic world.

Everyone knew that China violated almost every aspect of world commerce. Everyone knew that China would never allow the U.S. to trade with China the same way that Beijing traded with America. Everyone knew that 1.3-billion-person China was a neo-imperialist Communist dictatorship that was headed on an announced trajectory of world hegemony. Obama in particular thought that stopping China’s agenda would be medicine that was more painful than the disease.

Like the proverbial medieval mice who voted to warn of a marauding carnivorous house cat by putting a bell around his neck, the prognosis of Chinese mercantilism and aggression — and the need to confront Beijing — was right-on. But no one wished to do the messy, dangerous work of belling the Chinese cat.

The Obama administration’s Russian “reset” was an ungodly disaster. Vladimir Putin absorbed Eastern Ukraine and Crimea. He interfered freely but often clumsily in U.S. elections — well prior to 2016. John Kerry invited the Russians to reenter the Middle East on the lunatic idea of a Russian promise to address Syrian WMD. Putin violated prior agreements on the deployment of short-range missiles. The more Obama appeased Putin — dismantled missile defense in Eastern Europe, blamed the Bush administration for the tensions that were to be relieved by the reset, and in a hot-mic exchange offered to become more malleable with Putin if Putin would behave while Obama was up for reelection — the more Putin detested Obama.

NOW WATCH: ‘U.S. Justice Department Defends Trump’

U.S. Justice Department Defends Trump

Everyone knew that tired pretenses had nothing to do with the realities on the ground in the Middle East. The U.S. embassy belonged in Jerusalem. The Palestinians of today were no more “refugees” than were the Volga Germans. The strategic Golan Heights were never going to return to the Assad terrorist state. The U.S. had no business funneling financial assistance through the U.N. to Palestinians who either were engaged in terrorism or approved of it. Trump pulled back the curtain and showed all the little devilish men with gears and levers projecting a fake image of norms and protocols on the Middle East projection screen.

Again, these existential crises — Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, the Middle East — all preceded Trump. But they also all tested the Trump doctrine of restoring deterrence without engaging in costly optional wars in which in tactical victories cannot translate into definable strategic success or clear U.S. advantage in a cost-benefit analysis.

Trump’s enemies hope (translated into politicalese) that his ambitious foreign policy does not follow the success of Trump’s dynamic economy. At home, Trump caused a stir by all at once opening up more federal leasing for energy exploration, green-lighting pipelines, massively deregulating, cutting taxes, jawboning outsourcers and off-shorers, confronting asymmetrical trade partners, pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and the Paris climate accord, and recalibrating NAFTA. That huge risk of maximum changes everywhere and swarming the opposition all at once achieved a force-multiplying effect on the economy that soon boomed.

Trump probably believes that if he goes full-bore abroad, true to form, a domino effect will follow, given that the U.S. gains more sway each time it faces down a miscreant. The stakes are certainly high. A big China trade deal, an agreement to denuclearize North Korea and Iran, flipping Putin to become a neutral rather than an adversary, or a Middle East halfway accord could change global realities and empower the U.S. And so the gambler Trump wagers that he can do overseas what he did at home and pull off land-breaking agreements — all at once.

Can he?

Note that Trump shattered the blue wall in part because of his sober Jacksonianism: restoring U.S. tough deterrence without inserting a large military presence in any of the hellholes that U.S. troops have been deployed to in the past 50 years, much less falling into a conventional war that America could win, but only at considerable cost. Bombing the “sh*t” out of ISIS was a successful example of a non non-intervention. Early on, the canny Trump, alone of his Republican rivals, fathomed that voters neither wanted any more Obama apologetics nor would put up with another Afghanistan, Libya, or Iraq.

Squaring that circle of toughness without risking a major war is now Trump’s political challenge, given that the shelf life of rhetorical deterrence is brief.

The United States cannot abide renegade lunatic regimes with nuclear missiles aimed at its heartland, or aggressive nuclearized regimes with which the U.S. had either already fought a major war or narrowly avoided one. China’s destruction of global trading norms only whets China’s appetite to translate its huge profits into military power and neocolonial adventurism, on the theory that countries that have appeased its mercantilism will probably do the same in matters of its aggressive foreign and military policy.

The Palestinians felt that during the Obama years they were insidiously persuading the United States to ostracize the moderate Arab regimes, embrace an Iranian foil, and decouple from Israel.

Putin asserted that his weak Russia was a match for a strong U.S. because he assumed that he was strong and Obama weak — and therefore his own godhead could do what his country otherwise could not.

Yet Trump all at once is attempting to straighten out all the foolishness of the last decade with China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and the Middle East, and, again, he is doing so simultaneously, not sequentially. He might remember that China is the chief threat, and it has some leverage with both Iran and North Korea. In other words, it would certainly be in China’s interest to see the U.S. in a mess with its surrogates in Tehran and Pyongyang while America seeks to face down Chinese mercantilism — with the Middle East descending into another hot war.

So, Trump could achieve either high-profile success — or became mired in endless engagements and a pre-election, public-relations disaster.

Halving the Chinese trade deficit and forcing it to follow global rules would be an astounding achievement. So would denuclearizing North Korea and preventing Iran from getting the bomb. As would finally telling the Palestinians to give up terrorism and get on with building a state, or corralling Putin so that he abandons dreams of a new Soviet Empire and accepts that Eastern Europe, the Baltic States, and the breakaway republicans are never going to be Russian again. Prodding a change in government in Venezuela would create momentum elsewhere in authoritarian Latin America. Again, to do all that at once, rather than in sequence, would be singular achievements — and yet likely improbable.

George W. Bush tried to address just three existential challenges all at once following 9/11, and it all but destroyed his presidency. Bush not only fashioned a successful multifaceted anti-terrorism strategy that foiled subsequent attempts to repeat the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, but he took the war to the enemy. Yet soon the U.S. was fighting wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, while trying to stop North Korea’s sudden emergence as a nuclear power, and while battling Iranian terrorists inside Iraq and Tehran’s own nuclear agenda — as China stepped up its global profile and began translating its enormous profits into a growing military, and as OPEC and Middle East suppliers helped drive up the cost of oil.

What was problematic about Bush’s “Axis of Evil” of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea was not that the term was necessarily inaccurate about the threats all three posed, or the need to address all of them eventually. The rub was that a country with a sizable force fighting in Afghanistan might abruptly find itself fighting three new dirty conflicts all at once.

In short, Trump might learn from the past and avoid what his opponents hope for — a series of conflicts dovetailing with the 2020 election, as the financial and psychological strain tax the electorate, as they did from 2006 to 2008.

Note in this regard how deeply Trump’s opposition is invested in seeing  him fail or, specifically, how private citizen John Kerry, last spring and summer, and, most recently, Senator Dianne Feinstein have met with the oleaginous Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif, ostensibly as “adults in the room” who agree on waiting Trump out — which in fact was the explicit advice recently given to the Chinese by former State Department official Susan Thornton.

Trump’s “principled realism,” “Jacksonianism,” or “the Trump doctrine” ostensibly is tit-for-tat deterrence, not nation-building or optional interventions. If Iran hits an American ship, the U.S. will take out a port facility — but not set foot in Iran. If North Korea sends more missiles over Japan with Chinese approval, maybe Japan might have to do the same thing to North Korea with U.S. sanction.

But Trump also must remember that he ambitiously is trying to solve the major festering challenges of U.S. foreign policy — all at once and right before an election, when his political opposition at home, most of the European Union, and our enemies would like to see him fail at last. So in the next 17 months we should expect all sorts of provocations from abroad, and so-called Logan Acting at home, to make Trump stumble and get into a messy intervention before the election.

He should not take the bait.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/trump-foreign-policy-challenge-deterrence-without-war/

Dem Ilhan Omar’s Islamic Fascism Is Just About What America Dem Feminists Crave For!

ILHAN OMAR, PATRIOT?

by John Hinderaker  at PowerLine:

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has generally seemed to have nothing but contempt for the country that took her in as a refugee, educated her and elected her to Congress. But in a speech at a CAIR event in Bellevue, Washington, on Saturday, she sounded almost patriotic as she described her own successes and the growing power of Muslims in American government.

This is the poster for the event. It emphasizes the theme of Muslim power:

These are the first few minutes of Omar’s speech:

These introductory comments include a jarring note: Omar’s claim that she is fighting against “efforts to ban our entire religion from this country.” Really? As a Congresswoman, Omar should know that the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, and there is no way any religion can be “banned from this country.” Moreover, I am not aware of a single person anywhere–let alone a political movement that needs to be fought against by Omar–that advocates banning the entire Muslim religion from the U.S.

It is hard to tell, sometimes, whether Ilhan Omar is a skilled demagogue or a person for whom allowances must be made because, as Nancy Pelosi put it, she has a “different experience in the use of words” and therefore cannot be held to normal standards of veracity. Unfortunately, in the years to come we are likely to have many opportunities to revisit this question.

 

 

Michelle Obama’s Former Chief of Staff, Tina Tchen, Appears in Smollett Case Trouble

Something making Michelle Obama’s ex-chief of staff Tina Tchen nervous about that Smollett case?

by Monica Showalter  at  American Thinker:

.

If anyone ever needed a proxy indicator of sorts to get a sense if some miscreant is guilty of something or not, well, acting guiltily is often that indicator. Cops look for this all the time.

That’s what Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff, Tina Tchen, is doing, avoiding process servers from a Chicago-based special counsel charged with finding out if some untoward influence was used in the Jussie Smollett hoax case and the even stranger decision of Chicago district attorney Kim Foxx to let him off the hook. Here’s Fox News:

Officials are trying to get to the bottom of it, asking Tchen (who made phone calls to Foxx) to testify and she won’t take her papers from process servers, she’s just deluding herself that they will go away. She’d rather not answer any questions about why Justin Smollett got off scot free.

Slink, slink, hide, hide, gotta get away from those process servers, who are staking themselves out behind every bush like repo men. I know what this is like from the process server end: in San Francisco in the 1980s, I actually used to be a process server. People like Tchen to us, were colloquially known as ‘dirtbags’ because they wouldn’t take their papers, but they never did get away with not eventually getting their papers. They just wasted our time.

It raises questions about what she doesn’t want to testify about. Can it be that something other than justice was served as Smollett walked? Why is she running scared?

 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/something_making_michelle_obamas_exchief_of_staff_tina_tchen_nervous_about_that_smollett_case.html

The Horrible Shame of Being American White in AD 2019….How Can the Nation Survive?

Confessions of a Recovering White Supremacist

By David Solway at American Thinker:

 

My name is David Solway and I am a recovering white supremacist. For many years I had no doubt that my supremacy and attendant privileges were morally and historically deserved. But of late I have begun to doubt these assumptions, owing to the tornado of contempt and animadversion that has come my way via the media, establishment politicians on the left, various identity groups, assorted intellectuals, and even former friends.

This has led me to reconsider my principles and beliefs, to subject them to relentless scrutiny in order to discover if there is any justice to the criticism and vilification I have endured, and whether I should modify my convictions and mend my ways. Obviously, I first needed to review these convictions and see precisely what they consisted of before I could arrive at a just conclusion.

It seemed to me that my “white supremacism” comprised some of the following items and elements.

• I am white.
• I believed that Judeo-Hellenic-Christian civilization, for all its flaws and missteps, was on balance an undeniable boon for mankind, raising vast populations from abject poverty, tyrannical compulsion, and low horizons of expectation and achievement.
• I was convinced that Western civilization engendered enormous advances in religious thought, art, philosophical speculation, science, medicine, technology and infrastructure, giving us the presumed blessings and inventions we all take for granted: longer life spans and increased leisure; readily available transportation; electricity; interior heating; viable buildings; a wide range of comestibles; sanitation facilities; clean water; revolutionary surgical techniques; communication devices; labor-saving implements and tools; great painting, sculpture, architecture, music and literature; and indeed, almost everything we touch, experience, eat and drink, look at, wear and enjoy, down to the tiniest domestic objects. The list of such supposed goods is endless and is with few exceptions associated with the energy and resourcefulness of white males of chiefly European descent.
• I believed that a free-market economy was infinitely superior to a command economy and that the proof was everywhere to be seen by those who still had eyes to see. What this had to do with white supremacy was never entirely clear to me, but then, the principal economists of merit were chiefly Scottish and English and tended to be men — same for those who pioneered the Industrial Revolution of which we are all the ostensible beneficiaries.

However, I eventually came to understand that I was without question guilty of hatred and bigotry. True, I was brought up in a culture whose axioms I imbibed with my mother’s milk — also white — but that is no excuse. I never thought to examine the issue independently, which makes me equally guilty of laziness and congenital myopia.

I now feel great shame to have believed that science, medicine, art, technology and the rest of it constituted anything more than a mere whimsical distraction, that white European males comprised anything other than an evolutionary mistake, and that the world we inherited from them was not what it plainly is, a major inconvenience if not a blight upon the progressive development of the species.

But I must also confess that I am in something of a quandary. For what am I to do and think the next time I flick a light switch, pour a glass of filtered water from the kitchen tap, drive my car, shop at a supermarket with its laden shelves, make a phone call, turn on the television, visit the medical clinic for my tetanus shot and flu injection, consult my wrist watch, speak into a functioning microphone at the next academic conference I attend, ride the elevator, activate the AC unit that makes the humid weather bearable, use my credit card, click my ballpoint pen, work on the computer, cook on a propane-fired grill, shave with a handy razor, light the furnace against the winter cold, peer into a telescope at the local observatory, walk into a church or synagogue, buy a book with legible type, go to a movie, plug in my guitar amplifier, power my lawnmower, fly to Greece on a summer vacation, uncork a bottle of Languedoc wine and sip my evening Scotch, dine on salmon seined from the Pacific by white fishermen in perfectly engineered boats, buy a pair of comfortable shoes complete with tongue and uppers, listen to an opera in my living room, call a plumber to repair a broken pipe, deposit my earnings safely in a bank, rely on the rule of law and presumption of innocence, and so much more?

Come to think of it, not really a big deal (Photo credit: NASA)

And of course, I am not alone in my misery. White supremacy may be associated with males of European descent, but females of European descent are also white and must share the burden. They, too, are complicit in the common degradation of the pathology of the pale. They, too, must atone for their prerogatives and entitlements. They, too, will be the victims of rampant intersectionality and stringent chromatic mandates.

In any event, I can no longer escape the heavy sense of guilt that weighs me down. As a white male of European lineage, I am now determined to salve and redeem my tarnished conscience and to forfeit my position of unjust pre-eminence. There is no way around it. I absorb texts that exhort me to apologize to those I have impenitently abused and make whatever amends I can. I attend meetings that purport to cure me of my debased addiction to the European project. I am presently studying Kijiji to find where I can buy a yurt.

 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/confessions_of_a_recovering_white_supremacist.html

Why Are Today’s Dems So Reprehensible? BECAUSE THEY’VE BECOME FASCISTS!

Birds of a feather: Why are so many Democrats so reprehensible in exactly the same way?

by Patricia McCarthy  at  American Thinker:

 

Observing the events of the past two years, the past month since the release of the Mueller report, and the last few days of contempt charges, it is impossible to miss the defining characteristics of the most repugnant Democrats driving the impeach Trump campaign.

Pelosi, Swalwell, Schiff, Blumenthal, Nadler, Cohen, Waters, Harris, Booker, et al. are of a piece.  Each of them seems to possess an almost identical and wholesale lack of any character at all.  Each of them is vicious to the core.  Each of them is either wholly unaware of his own hypocrisy, as in falsely accusing Attorney General William Barr of contempt, when those who were in Congress at the time were hysterical when Attorney General Eric Holder was found to be in contempt of Congress.  Or they assume the American people are ignorant and unable to discern the deviousness of their plan to destroy Trump.

Holder actually was in contempt of Congress for authentic scandals involving deaths of Americans, such as Operation Fast and Furious.  Barr is not.  Unlike Holder, Barr is the smartest lawyer in the room.  He knows, as does any sentient legal scholar, that to give the House Judiciary Committee what they are asking for — names of intelligence assets, legally protected grand jury testimony — would be breaking the law.  The Democrats with their handmaidens in the media are manufacturing a “constitutional crisis” simply to hound the president and prolong the collusion hoax as long as possible.

Curiously, Trump does not seem to be at all concerned.  Hmmm.  Could it be that the president sees this throng of sociopaths for exactly who they are: unscrupulous to the shallow depth of their soulless beings?  These people are about one thing alone: their own political power.  To that end, they have no knowledge or grasp of right and wrong.  Like the malignant narcissists they are, they are unable to consider the damage they do, to the country and to people, both groups and individuals.

Likewise, the criminals who invented and perpetrated the Russia collusion hoax are equally unable to see themselves as they are: corrupt and treasonous.  Like the Democrats in Congress, and their counterparts in the media, this coterie of thugs felt absolutely justified in breaking countless laws and abrogating the Constitution to prevent Trump from taking office.  One of Dennis Prager’s most oft repeated quotes is that “those who do not confront evil resent those who do.”

Trump has done an immense amount of good throughout his life.  He builds things, he has employed hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world, and he decided that the U.S. needed some fixing after the damage done by Obama.  So he ran for the office of president.  The Left, even those among the Left who knew him and liked him, hated him from that moment on with the “white hot passion of a thousand suns” (Cheers).  They apparently decided then and there that he would never be president.  Like the schemers in the old film Seven Days in May, their arrogance exceeded their intelligence.  Their contempt for the president and his supporters is the very definition of bigoted intolerance.  They hate Trump because he is not one of them; he is a better man, a better father, a better president, and they know it.

There is another quote of Prager’s that is appropriate here: “If we continue to teach about tolerance and intolerance instead of good and evil, we will end up with tolerance of evil.”  For the past fifty years, the imposition of multiculturalism and all that it has entailed, two generations have been taught that tolerance of all things must supersede all other values.  Ergo, we’ve arrived at a place in which the bulk of one of our two political parties has, if inadvertently, embraced evil in the name of tolerance — radical Islam, all variations of sexual orientation including pedophilia, the absolutist notion that all minorities are victims, all women are victims.  We must now accept the trope that all white men are bad, a blight on civilized society.  How destructive is this to our country?  It is devastating, and they do it purposefully, these Democrats.  They have become the embodiment of Cloward-Piven and Saul Alinsky.  They want to destroy what the founders created, the greatest, freest nation on the planet.  At least it used to be.

Our left has done such terrible damage over the years. They have destroyed academia, especially our once  great universities.  Few of them today permit free speech or freedom from the forced acceptance of all things politically correct.  They no longer value critical thinking, so they do not teach it.  They indoctrinate.  Students who deviate from the new rules that seem to have leapt off the pages of Orwell’s 1984 will be harassed, punished.  They have terrorized the young with their frightening exhortations of man-caused global warming hysteria. They are working hard to obliterate the absolute truth of gender. Science and biology be damned. It is into this moment in time that Trump was miraculously elected to the absolute horror of the Democrats. Their behavior since that day has been monstrous. They’ve lost their minds and have behaved badly from that day forward. Now they are just pathetic, an embarrassment to this country. These Democrats, the ones who so virulently attack and lie about Trump, are worse than ethically challenged; they are congenitally predisposed to be hateful. The lot of them should be so ashamed of themselves, but they’re not. They are birds of feather and a loathsome bird it is.

 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/birds_of_a_feather_why_are_so_many_democrats_so_reprehensible_in_exactly_the_same_way.html

 

“Bernie Sanders An Old Stalinist If There Ever Was One!”

NORMAN PODHORETZ ON THE LEFT

by Scott Johnson  at PowerLine:

The Spring issue of the Claremont Review of Books has not yet gone to press, but it will feature an interview with the incomparable Norman Podhoretz that has been posted online here for subscribers and circulated by the editors in samizdat. The interview is great. Rush Limbaugh flagged it in a segment posted here. Mr. Ace plucked some juicy morsels in a post here at Ace of Spades. The CRB’s idea in posting the interview is, of course, to entice recalcitrant readers to give up $19.95 and subscribe. Here is NP on the ascendant left in the Democratic Party:

Well, some of them say they’re pro-socialism, but most of them don’t know what they’re talking about. They ought to visit a British hospital or a Canadian hospital once in a while to see what Medicare for All comes down to. They don’t know what they’re for.

I mean, the interesting thing about this whole leftist movement that started in the ’60s is how different it is from the Left of the ’30s. The Left of the ’30s had a positive alternative in mind—what they thought was positive—namely, the Soviet Union. So America was bad; Soviet Union, good. Turn America into the Soviet Union and everything is fine.

The Left of the ’60s knew that the Soviet Union was flawed because its crimes that had been exposed, so they never had a well-defined alternative. One day it was Castro, the next day Mao, the next day Zimbabwe, I mean, they kept shifting—as long as it wasn’t America. Their real passion was to destroy America and the assumption was that anything that came out of those ruins would be better than the existing evil. That was the mentality—there was never an alternative and there still isn’t.

So Bernie Sanders, who honeymooned in the Soviet Union—I mean, I don’t know him personally, but I have relatives who resemble him; I know him in my bones—and he’s an old Stalinist if there ever was one. Things have gone so haywire, he was able to revive the totally discredited idea of socialism, and others were so ignorant that they picked it up.

As for attitudes toward America, I believe that Howard Zinn’s relentlessly anti-American People’s History of the United States sells something like 200,000 copies a year, and it’s a main text for the study of American History in the high schools and in kindergarten. So, we have miseducated a whole generation, two generations by now, about almost everything.

 

Murdering Christians Throughout the World Ignored in Leftist America

Media Silence Surrounds Muslim Massacre of Christians

by Thomas D. Williams  at Breitbart:

Pius Utomi Ekpei / AFP / Getty Images

Political leaders and public figures were falling over themselves this weekend to condemn the mosque attacks in New Zealand, while dozens of Christians were slaughtered by Muslims in Nigeria to the sound of crickets.

The mosque attacks were indeed a horrific affair and worthy of universal condemnation. Presidents, prime ministers, royalty, and religious leaders rushed to extend their condolences to victims and their families — as well they should — while decrying the hate that purportedly motivated the shootings.

Without exception, the mainstream media gave top billing to the shootings, with newspapers carrying the story on their front pages and television news channels leading off their broadcasts with the story.

The bizarre aspect of the coverage was not, in fact, the attention paid to a heinous crime committed in New Zealand, but the absolute silence surrounding the simultaneous massacre of scores of Christians by Muslim militants in Africa.

As Breitbart News alone reported among major news outlets, Fulani jihadists racked up a death toll of over 120 Christians over the past three weeks in central Nigeria, employing machetes and gunfire to slaughter men, women, and children, burning down over 140 houses, destroying property, and spreading terror.

The New York Times did not place this story on the front page; in fact, they did not cover it at all. Apparently, when assessing “all the news that’s fit to print,” the massacre of African Christians did not measure up. The same can be said for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Detroit Free Press, the LA Times, and every other major paper in the United States.

The news shows from the three major television channels did not mention the story, and nor did CNN or MSNBC.

There are several possible explanations for this remarkable silence, and none of them is good.

Since, in point of fact, Muslim radicals kill Christians around the world with alarming frequency, it is probable that one more slaughter did not seem particularly newsworthy to the decision-makers at major news outlets. Muslims being killed, on the other hand, may strike many as newsworthy precisely because it is so rare.

A second motive for the media silence around the massacre of Christians in Nigeria may be geo-political and racial. New Zealand is a first-world country where such things are not supposed to happen, whereas many people still consider Africa to be a backwards place where brutal killings are par for the course.

Moreover, the slaughter of black Christians in Africa may not enkindle rage among westerners the way that the murder of white and brown Muslims in New Zealand would.

Finally, the story simply does not play to the political agenda that many mainstream media would like to advance. How much mileage can be gained from Muslims murdering Christians, when Christians in America are often seen as an obstacle to the “progress” desired by liberals? The left sees Christians in the United States as part of the problem and seeks to undermine their credibility and influence at every turn rather than emboldening them.

Anti-Christian bias has been rightly called “the last acceptable prejudice,” one that few bother condemning.

“No one much cares about offending Christians,” wrote the coalition of African-American pastors in an essay last Tuesday. “In fact, mocking, belittling, and blaspheming Christianity is becoming a bit of a trend in our culture. Anti-Christian bigotry truly is the last acceptable prejudice.”

“The hypocrisy on display is astounding,” the pastors continued. “Christianity is the dominant religion of our country. It is the foundation of our government and morality. And yet, Christians are treated as fair game for mockery and insult.”

Christians are by far the most persecuted religious group in the world, but the mainstream media routinely ignore this fact as if it were unimportant or uninteresting. As a result, many people do not even realize how widespread the persecution is or that 75 percent of the victims of religious persecution around the world are Christians.

Whatever the reason — or reasons — for the media silence surrounding the most recent massacres of Christians in Nigeria as well as numerous other such events, it should give right-thinking people pause.

By all means, the lethal shootings of dozens of Muslims in New Zealand is a massive story and merits extensive coverage. But it only stands to reason that similar coverage should be devoted to the slaughter of Christians.

For the moment, it serves as a poignant reminder that a double standard is at work when it comes to news coverage, and that it is Christians who inevitably draw the short straw.

Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter

https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/03/17/media-silence-surrounds-muslim-massacre-of-christians/

Today’s Fascistic Democrat Party History Exposed by the POWER OF TRUTH!

 

DEMOCRATS HATE BLACK PEOPLE  #walkaway

 

 

Examining Jussie and the Lefty Black Racists who HATE

Yes, ‘This Is America, 2019’

by Victor Davis Hanson  at  realclearpolitics:

There have been so far about three general reactions to the concocted Jussie Smollett psychodrama.

One, and the most common, has been apprehension that Smollett’s lies will discredit future real incidents of hate crimes against gays and minorities. This could be a legitimate concern, given the tensions within a multiracial society.

Yet, in fact, there is no evidence in the past that false reports (some lists of such fake hate crimes put the number at around 400) have had such an effect—either on spiking real hate crimes, suppressing reporting, discouraging police investigations, or preventing even more race-crime hoaxes.

As Heather Mac Donald has recently once again noted, the 2017 upswing in reported hate crimes from the prior year may well be largely because an additional 1,000 police agencies were for the first time reporting such crimes. Mac Donald also notes that a “hate crime”—a micro percentage of reported violent crime—is narrowly defined not to include general interracial violent victimization, a category in which African-Americans on average commit 85 percent of such crimes.

From Tawana Brawley to the Covington kids, fictive accounts of race-based bias and violence have not stopped purported victims from believing that they, too, could invent such incidents and win credibility—to say nothing of profitable attention. After all, the publicity of the Duke Lacrosse or Covington hoaxes did not suggest to Jussie Smollett that he would not be found credible. In fact, the opposite may be true. The more we hear of fake hate crimes, the more we will likely hear of future fake hate crimes.

Nor did the spate of prior fake racist crimes discourage quite influential media and celebrity grandees from rushing to embrace the unlikely narrative. After all, Americans were asked to believe without evidence that two venomous white men, with red MAGA hats, hooded, and deliberately prowling about at 2 a.m.  in subfreezing temperatures, in a liberal neighborhood of liberal Chicago (that went 83 percent for Hillary Clinton), were on the hunt for random minorities and gays, replete with customary ski-masks, lynching rope, and bleach.

And then, once the MAGA devils instinctively recognized a random early-morning passerby as a rather minor actor from a Fox TV series “Empire,” they would grow enraged and shout out racial and homophobic slurs and MAGA rah-rahs (“This is MAGA country!”)—incensed by their sudden recognition that their target was, in fact, the obviously world-famous Smollett (who said his white thuggish assaulters first yelled out “Empire!” then, to add clarity about their white fears of such a hit series, they added “F—ot Empire n—er!”).

Smollett, however, insists he stood defiant (“I don’t answer to Empire. My name ain’t Empire.”), in his role as a supposedly all-too-well known and despised actor in the alt-white world.

Further, we were asked to believe that in between blows from two much larger white demons, the relatively diminutive Smollett did not break off his phone call transmission. Instead, as he later described the fracas, he fought heroically back (“So I punched his ass right back. We started tussling”) and drove off the Trump-fueled monsters (“And I want a little gay boy who might watch this to see that I fought the f— back. I didn’t run off. They did.”), even as he was oblivious to the attempted lynching (“I noticed the rope around my neck and I started screaming”).

In addition, we were asked to believe that Smollett’s prior criminal conviction for providing police with false information during a DUI arrest, and the strange coincidence of receiving a recent death threat in the mail packaged with mysterious white powder (“In the letter, it had a stick figure hanging from a tree with a gun pointing toward it: ‘Smollett Jussie, you will die, black [bleep]. There was no address, but the return address said in big red letters, ‘MAGA.’“), would provide no useful context for these strange events.

Discrediting Hate Crimes?
Instead, Smollett fought off the racists for the greater good of America: “I have fought for love. I’m an advocate. I respect too much the people—who I am now one of those people—who have been attacked in any way. You do such a disservice when you lie about something like this.”

So do not dare question either the courage or the mettle of the crusading Smollett: “For me, the main thing was the idea that I somehow switched up my story, you know? And that somehow maybe I added a little extra trinket, you know, of the MAGA thing. I didn’t need to add anything like that. They called me a f—ot, they called me a n—er. There’s no which way you cut it. I don’t need some MAGA hat as the cherry on top of some racist sundae.”

Amen, Jussie.

Yet much of the nation believed all that and more. Politicians and celebrities did so within minutes. Many did not give up such credence, even as Smollett refused to hand over his cell phone records, which he had cited as electronic proof of the attack, given he supposedly was on the phone at the time with his manager, thus memorializing the attack. If you had any doubt about Smollett’s fiction, he reminds us again that such unbelief says more about you than him: “It feels like if I had said it was a Muslim, or a Mexican, or someone black, I feel like the doubters would have supported me much more. A lot more. And that says a lot about the place that we are in our country right now.”

Again, amen, it does say a lot, Jussie.

None of recent concocted racially motivated attacks have had any effect in demolishing public credibility about even the most improbable allegations of such assaults. Indeed, in our Orwellian world of racial melodrama, those who rushed to judgment to condemn Donald Trump and his supporters for Smollett’s suffering, turned 180 degrees on hearing the news of the Smollett fabrication. They now soberly and judiciously warned us not to do what they had just done. Instead America was “to wait for all the facts” and not “rush to judgement” in assuming that Smollett was guilty of fraud.

Smollett has shown that the most absurd narratives imaginable will continue to gain credence because they fill a deep psychological, cultural—and, yes, careerist—need for millions in the country to believe that hate crimes are epidemic, that they are the currency of the Right, and that they can only be addressed by more government scrutiny of a particular class of victimizers such as the Duke Lacrosse team, the Covington kids, or Smollett’s mythic red-hatted Trump racists.

(A cynic might have advised Smollett to have first checked that the anticipated surveillance cameras under which he staged the attack were pointing in the right direction, and that he should have ensured his “Empire”hirelings did not buy their sundry assault gear—masks, hats, etc.—all at the same store or at least not on film, and that Smollett himself should have not written them a traceable check for their services, and that he should have written into his script antifreeze dousing instead of household bleach that freezes at about 5 degrees.)

In 2019 America, the number of those likely victimized far outnumbers the shrinking pool of likely victimizers. The rewards and publicity for being a concocted victim of a frenzied Trump supporter far outweigh the possible downside of fabricating the entire incident. As we saw with the Kavanaugh and Covington fiascoes, if a crime could or should be true, then it more or less is.

Wasted Time and Money?
A second reaction was the far more legitimate worry that thousands of hours of careful police work were squandered, as resources were diverted from real crime investigations. Although so far, the overburdened Chicago police have been careful in downplaying this redirection in limited resources, it was no doubt gargantuan.Yet Smollett’s supporters almost immediately questioned the police department’s ethics when authorities ever so cautiously hinted that the facts and Smollett’s own behavior did not line up with a racist attack.

Smollett’s probable preemptive O.J. Simpson-like defense will run contrary to facts, but he has learned that ginning up popular furor against the police can, at worst, lead to leverage in plea bargaining and, at  best, turn potential local jurors into nullifying social justice warriors.

In lieu of either defense, he could turn to fallback defenses that he acted in a drug-induced diminished capacity and was not responsible for his actions—or that his jealous “Empire”duo secretly scouted out his nocturnal routines, were all the time covert Trump/MAGA converts, and, as traitors to their race and class, in envy of Smollett’s success, and as ingrates pounced despite receiving such generous financial help from him in the recent past.

Racism Against “Racists” Is Not Racism
Yet the third, most important, and most ignored reaction was that in some sense Smollett himself was a racist and had committed a hate crime.

His farce is yet another example that it is now largely permissible to slur and smear millions of purported Trump supporters, as either defined by their stereotyped race and gender or their red hats(with or without a logo). As pundits and talking heads nearly wept on screen in their worries about future potential hate crimes that might now not be taken seriously, they abjectly ignored the real hate crime that had just occurred. In truth, Smollett had done his best to ignite some sort of popular racially driven vendetta against conservative white male voters, previously known as “clingers,” “crazies,” “deplorables,” and “irredeemables” who, our elites warn, smell up Walmart, gross America out with toothless smiles, and should be swapped out for new immigrants.

Or as courageous Smollett described the motives for the faux-attack of his two Nigerian-American contractors, supposedly dressed up as Donald Trump’s white ogres, “I come really, really hard against 45”—that is, Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States—“I come really hard against his administration, and I don’t hold my tongue. I could only go off of their words. I mean, who says, “f—ot Empire n—er,” “This is MAGA country, n—er,” ties a noose around your neck, and pours [frozen?] bleach on you? And this is just a friendly fight? I will never be the man that this did not happen to. Everything is forever changed.”

In fact, no one says that, Jussie, and no one ever did say that except you who scripted the dialogue.

Given that the Smollett myth followed so closely after the Covington kids fiction, we can surmise that Smollett counted on two popular reactions: the left-wing public was still thirsty for more “proof” of MAGA white hatred, even if poorly scripted and logically implausible; and, second, Smollett was not much worried about any serious consequences if he should be caught once again in a made-up hate crime.

To paraphrase CNN anchorwoman Brooke Baldwin, who in careerist fashion immediately sought to gin up popular outrage over the Smollett “hate crime” attack: “This is America, 2019.”

Baldwin is right in her inference that we really are suffering from a national illness—and her own fact-free, careerist-driven editorializing and others like it are the proof.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/24/yes-this-is-america-2019/

NBA RACIST WARRIOR CHAMPS SHUN PRESIDENT TRUMP….GO OBAMA INSTEAD!

After Blowing Off Trump, NBA Champion Warriors Do Visit President … Obama

The Golden State Warriors, who have spoken out against the current administration and collectively decided not to visit the White House after winning the past two NBA championships did visit a president during a Thursday trip to Washington D.C., but it wasn’t Trump.

Before thumping the magic-less Wizards 126-118, the team met with former President Barack Obama in his office for about an hour.

“It was amazing,” Warriors All-Star forward Kevin Durant said following visit and the win.

http://www.realclearlife.com/sports/after-blowing-off-trump-nba-champion-warriors-do-visit-president-obama/